Assange’s supporters in federal parliament welcomed the prospect of a plea deal when it was revealed in March that the US Justice Department was considering allowing Assange to plead guilty to allow him to avoid serving jail time in the US.
Labor MP Julian Hill, a leading advocate of Assange, said: “Whatever you think of Assange, he is Australian, and enough is enough. The prime minister deserves enormous personal credit for his judgment and determination, never giving up in pursuing resolution of this case. Let’s hope for the best now.”
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, one of Assange’s biggest champions in parliament, said at the time: “Personally, I’d be thrilled with a breakthrough because this injustice has been wrong from the start and must be brought to an end.”
Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, who travelled to Washington last year to lobby for Assange’s release, thanked American politicians from across the partisan divide for advocating on Assange’s behalf and singled out Assange’s brother, Gabriel Shipton, for his “relentless” advocacy.
Joyce said his main concern with the case was the issue of extraterritoriality, given Assange was not on US soil when the alleged crimes were committed.
“I don’t want to be in a place in Australia where if I offend the Koran, I’m off to Riyadh; if I’ve offended the Chinese Communist Party, I’m off to Beijing,” he said.
Assange had been charged with conspiring to illegally obtain and disseminate classified US national defence information.
US ambassador to Australia Caroline Kennedy flagged a possible plea deal in an interview with this masthead last year, saying “there absolutely could be a resolution” to the Assange case.
The trove of more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts, such as a 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people, including two Reuters news staff. That video was released in 2010.
The hearing is taking place in the Mariana Islands because of Assange’s opposition to travelling to the continental US and the court’s proximity to Australia.
The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his many global supporters, who have long argued that as publisher of WikiLeaks, he should not face charges typically used against federal government employees who steal or leak information.
Many press freedom advocates argued that criminally charging Assange represented a threat to free speech.
Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over sex crime allegations.
After exhausting legal avenues in the British Supreme Court to stop his extradition to Sweden, in June 2012 he entered Ecuador’s embassy in London, where he remained for seven years.
Assange was dragged out of the embassy in April 2019 and jailed for skipping bail. He was held at London’s Belmarsh top-security prison and spent most of the following five years fighting extradition to the United States. The Swedish sex crime investigation was discontinued in November 2019.
While in Belmarsh, he married his partner Stella, with whom he had two children while he was in the Ecuadorean embassy.