Assange is free - but his case sets a disturbing precedent

Julian Assange had become something of an embarrassment – the centre of a legal battle that threatened to make Charles Dickens’s fictional Jarndyce v Jarndyce case in Bleak House look like a brief squabble over a parking ticket.

- ALAN RUSBRIDGER

He had already spent more than five years, at who knows what cost, in a UK maximum security prison, with the prospect of years more to come, as his legal team fought to prevent him from being extradited to the US to spend still more time in jail.

Now, after an apparent plea deal involving a somewhat surreal hearing on a little-known island in the western Pacific, he can resume something passing for normal life in his home country of Australia. It is one of the singular aspects of the story that – during his multiple years in forms of incarceration, voluntary or otherwise – Assange has somehow acquired a wife and two children. He can now, literally, spend more time with his family.

That Assange is free is, in my view, very good news. The downside is that he won that freedom by having to admit one offence under the 1917 US Espionage Act.

Whatever Assange was, he was not a spy. Publisher, journalist, activist, information anarchist, whistleblower, impresario – he is all those things. But no one, not even the US government, seriously alleged that whatever he did in 2010-11 amounted to espionage.

So a line has been crossed in using the blunt instrument of the Espionage Act – to which there is no permitted defence – against someone behaving with journalistic intent to disclose information for which a serious public interest argument was comfortably made.