Beijing Praises Julian Assange For "Getting The Truth Out"



"I want to say that the relevant information released by the WikiLeaks (platform) allowed the international community to better understand the facts and the truth", said the spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People's Republic of China, Mao Ning, at a press conference.


Even so, the spokesperson stated that, despite having knowledge of "relevant information" about Assange's release, Chinese diplomacy does not comment on the "specific situation".


Assange is on his way to the Mariana Islands, a North American overseas territory in the Pacific, where the agreement will be formalized.


On March 27, the People's Republic of China expressed solidarity with the Australian journalist and called for "fairness and justice" in Assange's case.


According to Beijing, Assange "exposed a large amount of secret information about the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and also revealed the fact that the CIA carried out all types of cyber attacks".


The WikiLeaks portal announced on Monday that Assange, 52 years old, of Australian nationality, left the high security prison in Belmarsh, United Kingdom, where he was being held, and had already left the country, with the aim of returning to Australia.


The announcement comes after court documents revealed that Assange reached an agreement with the United States Department of Justice that will allow him to return to Australia.


Assange will appear in court on Wednesday in the Mariana Islands where he will plead guilty to one of the 18 charges against him for disclosing secret US information in the 2010s.


In exchange, he will be sentenced to 62 months in prison, equivalent to the time he has already served in a high-security British prison, to finalize the deal with the Department of Justice.


The US court charged Assange with 18 crimes for violating the Espionage Act as part of one of the biggest leaks of classified information in the history of the United States, in 2010, which revealed secrets from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as data on detainees at the Guantánamo base, among other matters.


In 2019, the journalist was detained after the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where Assange took refuge for seven years, withdrew the asylum he had been granted in 2012.


Assange's image has been damaged many times over the years, especially when the WikiLeaks platform released thousands of hacked emails from the US Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton's team in 2016, during the US presidential campaign.


At the time, these revelations earned praise from Republican candidate Donald Trump.


According to the CIA, the documents were obtained by Russian agents, but WikiLeaks denied this.


In 2011, the five newspapers (including the New York Times, Guardian and Le Monde) associated with the WikiLeaks platform condemned the platform's method of making unredacted US State Department cables public, arguing that they were likely to "put endanger certain sources".


But, at the end of 2022, the same newspapers called on the US Administration to drop the charges against Julian Assange.