Aljazeera :
During one of the many conversations I had with Julian Assange while he was at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, I asked him what he would do first if he could get out of the building.
“I would look at the sky,” he said, calmly.
This was in 2016, and at that time he had already spent more than 2,500 days without seeing the sky.
Three years later, in April 2019, he was finally “allowed” to leave the embassy, but was not given a single moment to look up at the sky.
British police barged into the building, arrested him, and quickly transferred him to the high-security Belmarsh Prison in South London, where he would remain imprisoned and basically in solitary confinement, for the next five years.
I’ve known Julian for over nine years, but never got to meet him as a free man. His two children, now five and seven years old, never got to see their father as a free man either.
This injustice, finally and hopefully, seems to be coming to an end.
As I write this, Julian is in a plane in the sky, flying towards an island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean that is under US jurisdiction.
Once he gets there, he will face an American judge and plead guilty to a “crime” – one count of conspiracy to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents. He will then be sentenced to “time already served”, and hopefully, return to his native Australia as a free man.
So, today is a day for celebration. One of the most courageous publishers of our age is – finally – on his way to freedom.
As we celebrate Julian’s freedom, however, we must not turn a blind eye to the grave crime simultaneously being committed against not only him, but also journalism and freedom of speech.
Today, Julian is being forced to plead guilty to a made-up “crime” after years of arbitrary detention, but those who are responsible for the very real crimes that he exposed – the killing of Reuters journalists and Iraqi civilians by US forces among others – are still walking free.