Wikileaks founder Julian Assange sentenced in UK prison
Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange was sentenced on 1 May 2019 to 50 weeks (about 1 year 1 month) in a British prison for breaching his bail by entering the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Key Facts
- The 47-year-old Australian national was arrested when Ecuador terminated his asylum on 11th April 2019.
- He spent about seven years holed up in Ecuadoran Embassy and was found guilty of breaching the UK’s Bail Act.
- Ecuador granted him refuge in their London embassy in 2012 to avoid his extradition to Sweden on rape accusations.
- He currently faces US federal conspiracy charges in response to allegations that he conspired with former US intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to download classified databases, which is one of the largest leaks of government secrets till date.
- It is now up to UK to decide whether to extradite Assange to US where if found guilty and convicted he would face up to five years in US prison.
Wikileaks
- It was founded in 2006 by Julian Assange, an Australian computer programmer.
- The whistle-blowing website is a not for profit international media organisation. It obtains and publishes confidential documents and images, news leaks or classified data provided by anonymous sources.
- It has published many classified documents from film industry to national security and to war.
- It hit headlines in 2010 when it released footage of US soldiers killing civilians from a helicopter in Iraq.
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Month: Current Affairs - May, 2019