The Assange compromise leaves a lot to be desired

Stella Assange’s elation was palpable, after what she has described as a whirlwind 72 hours. She was speaking to the BBC in Australia, where she was waiting to be reunited with her husband, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who had just been freed from prison in the UK under a three-way deal between the UK, the US and Australia. 

Assange was due to travel to Australia via the Mariana Islands, a US dependency in the Pacific, where a judge was expected to accept his plea of guilty to a single charge under the US Espionage Act, relating to classified material published on his WikiLeaks site back in 2010. He was to be sentenced to ‘time served’ – the five years he spent on remand in the UK’s top-security Belmarsh prison – and released with no further charge on the books or penalty in waiting. 

In one sense, this was a deal that had been waiting to happen, ever since the involvement of Assange’s native Australia was first disclosed late last year.