Julian Assange en route for court hearing after plea deal
Newshour
BBC
4.2 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 25 June 2024
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The wife of the Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, says she's elated that he's left jail in Britain, but remains worried that his fourteen-year legal battle is not yet over. Mr Assange has left the UK as part of a plea deal with American prosecutors to avoid extradition to the United States. He's due to appear in court in a remote US Pacific territory, where he'll plead guilty to a single charge under the Espionage Act. We'll hear from his wife and ask whether Mr Assange's work was necessary or damaging?
Also in the programme: part of Kenya's parliament complex has been set on fire and several people have reportedly been shot dead during huge protests against planned tax rises; and Israel's top court has told the military to end an exemption for ultra-Orthodox religious students straining the coalition government led by Benjamin Netanyahu.
(Picture: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange disembarks from a plane at Bangkok Don Mueang International Airport in Thailand. Credit: Wikileaks via Reuters)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to News Hour it's coming to you live from the BBC World Service |
| 0:07.2 | studios in Central London I'm Tim Franks and in a little while we'll be going to this story that is unveiling as we are on air |
| 0:16.7 | which is that part of Kenya's Parliament complex has been set on fire several people |
| 0:21.8 | reportedly shot there during huge protests against |
| 0:25.2 | planned tax rises, more on that in just under 15 minutes. |
| 0:30.0 | We're beginning though with the news and an extraordinary legal battle appears to be over or at least very nearly over. |
| 0:37.0 | Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has been freed from high security prison in London. He spent five years there, |
| 0:44.4 | fighting an attempt by the US authorities to extradite him to stand trial over his |
| 0:49.6 | release of national defense information. And for seven years before that, Assange had been hold up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London seeking |
| 0:57.3 | political asylum, which was first granted and then withdrawn. |
| 1:01.1 | His release from Belmarsh prison in London has come |
| 1:04.1 | after he's reached a deal with the US authorities |
| 1:06.4 | which will see him plead guilty to criminal charges |
| 1:08.8 | but walk free on the basis of the time |
| 1:11.7 | he's already served on remand. |
| 1:13.3 | In this program we'll hear from his wife, from a member of his legal team and |
| 1:17.2 | from a former colleague who fell out with him. |
| 1:19.4 | First, a reminder of how this very long saga began. |
| 1:24.0 | It was 2006 that Assange founded WikiLeaks as the go-to place for anyone wanting to leak information. |
| 1:31.0 | It was four years later the WikiLeaks published a huge |
| 1:33.9 | trove of classified data from the US Department of Defense, including video footage shot |
| 1:38.4 | from a US military helicopter and showing the killing of civilians in Iraq, |
... |
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