WikiLeaks founder Julian is expected to Assangepleaded guilty this week to violating the US Espionage Act in a deal aimed at ending his detention in the UK and allowing him to return to his home.fire V Australia.

US Attorneys they said in documentYes judicial What Assange52 years old agreed to plead guilty to single criminal charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose classified information U.S. National Defense, according to documents filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.

It is planned that Assange The verdict will be handed down at a hearing on the island of Saipan on Wednesday at 9 a.m. It is likely that He is paid for the time he has already served and no new prison sentences are imposed.

In 2010, WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents about Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the largest security breach of its kind in US military history.

Assange During the administration of former President Donald Trump, he was charged with WikiLeaks’ massive release of classified US documents that were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act.

More than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield reports, such as helicopter video from 2007. Apache Americans opened fire on suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people, including two Reuters employees. This video was made public in 2010.

Charges against Assange has outraged his many supporters around the world, who have long argued that AssangeAs a Wikileaks editor, he should not be subject to the accusations that are often leveled against Wikileaks employees. federal government that steals or discloses information.

Many press freedom advocates argue that criminal charges Assange poses a threat to freedom of expression.

Assange He was first detained in Britain in 2010 on a European Arrest Warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over sex offense charges, which were later dropped. He fled to the Ecuadorian embassy, ​​where he remained for seven years to avoid extradition to Sweden.

In 2019, he was dragged from the embassy and jailed for jumping bail. Since then, he has been in London’s Belmarsh maximum security prison, from where he has been fighting extradition to the United States for almost five years.

During his time in Belmarsh he married his partner Stella, with whom he had two children while he was a refugee in the Ecuadorian embassy. (Reuters).