Who is Julian Assange? A champion of transparency or an irresponsible narcissist?

For some he is a tireless defender of transparency and for others he is a dangerous disseminator of secrets. Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, He is a controversial figure who polarizes opinions. This has earned him to be claimed by Washington to try him for espionage.

SIGHT: British justice opens the door to the extradition of Julian Assange to the United States

This Friday, the US government managed to get the British justice to annul a previous decision not to hand him over, opening the door for him to try his extradition again soon.

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The 50-year-old Australian, with pale skin, gray hair and a sober expression, which sometimes wields a sarcastic half smile, has spent more than nine years in prison.

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First, he was a refugee since June 2012 in the Ecuadorian embassy in London so as not to be extradited to Sweden due to rape accusations that he denounced as a trap to hand him over to the United States.

Then, since his spectacular arrest by British police in April 2019 when Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno withdrew the protection offered by his predecessor Rafael Correa, held in a high-security prison near London.

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With serious health problems according to his lawyers, coordinated at the international level by former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, he has fought from there against the extradition process initiated by the United States, which wants to try him for espionage, an accusation that could cost him a 175-year sentence jail.

Assange and WikiLeaks became famous in 2010 with the publication of hundreds of thousands of secret US documents that exposed their practices in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Pacifists and advocates of transparency praised him for revealing civilian deaths, acts of torture and clandestine military operations.

But the online dissemination of unedited documents, which exposed the names of informants, earned him the distancing of some newspapers that had initially collaborated with him and Washington accused him of putting lives in danger with his irresponsibility.

US elections and Catalan independence movement

His long confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy had been extinguishing his media prominence, until in November 2016 he interfered in the US elections and in October 2017, in the Catalan independence process.

WikiLeaks likely contributed to Donald Trump’s victory by posting thousands of secret campaign messages from his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s campaign, apparently leaked by Russia. And he supported the Catalan independentists against the Spanish government of the time, disseminating images of the harsh police response to the banned independence referendum.

He was accused of spreading “Russian propaganda”, but Assange denied being in Moscow’s service: “WikiLeaks has published more than 800,000 documents related to Russia or [su presidente Vladimir] Putin, and most are critical, “he said.

“Egocentric” and “obsessive”

Assange was born on July 3, 1971 in the Australian town of Townsville.

His mother, theater artist Christine Ann Assange, separated from her father before Julian was born, who for 15 years lived in more than 30 cities, before settling in Melbourne.

An intelligent student, he studied mathematics, physics and computer science at university without graduating. He was then seduced by computer piracy and came to enter the websites of NASA and the Pentagon under the pseudonym “Mendax.”

When WikiLeaks rose to prominence, he was hailed as a computer whiz and a libertarian messiah. “The Most Dangerous Man in the World,” was the title of a biography of him.

But the criticism quickly mounted. Old friends and collaborators described him as “self-centered,” “obsessive,” and “paranoid.”

“The man who claims to reveal the secrets of the world, does not bear his,” said Andrew O’Hagan, who was asked to write a biography of Assange and ended up throwing in the towel.

“Determined ”and“ committed”

But others, such as the veteran Australian journalist Mary Kostakidis, who visited him in the Ecuadorian legation in 2013 and in the London jail in 2019, claim that he is “the complete opposite of a narcissist.”

He is a man “with principles, very determined, very committed to the project,” he told the Sunday Morning Herald two years ago, implying, as others have already done and despite the lack of a formal diagnosis, that he may suffer Asperger syndrome, a type of autism that affects social relationships.

Among its defenders are celebrities such as the American actress Pamela Anderson, the British designer Vivienne Westwood, the former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis and the rocker Roger Waters.

During his years in the Ecuadorian embassy, ​​where he denounces that all his movements were spied on, he secretly had two children with the South African lawyer Stella Morris.

Assange has at least one other son, Daniel, in his 30s.

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Deshawn