It was a messy ending to an often chaotic story. Julian Assange was released last week from Belmarsh prison to board a flight to the US-governed Pacific island of Saipan. There, under a special deal with the US authorities, he pleaded guilty in court to illegally securing and publishing classified documents in exchange for a prison sentence of five years, which he had already served in British prisons. And so, for the first time in 12 years, Assange found himself a free man.
Having to plead guilty to espionage was a necessity for Assange to gain personal freedom. But it raises wider questions about journalistic freedom. Assange has been charged with espionage not because he spied for a foreign government but because he did what many journalists do: he published classified material that the US government did not want the public to see. The charges Assange faced “rely almost entirely on conduct that investigative journalists engage in every day”, Columbia University’s Jameel Jaffer, an expert on free speech, observed in 2019 when the indictments were first brought. That is why “the indictment should be understood as a frontal attack on press freedom”.
