Julian Assange... the controversial founder of WikiLeaks

 Julian Assange, who cut a deal with U.S. authorities in exchange for his release, is seen by some as a champion of free speech. But others say the 52-year-old Australian has been reckless with confidential information, putting a number of sources at risk.

Assange founded the WikiLeaks website, which exposed government secrets around the world by leaking information, perhaps most famously American military files related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He spent more than a decade either in prison or holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid extradition, first to Sweden, where he faced rape charges, and then to the United States.

Assange was born in 1971 in Townsville, Queensland, and moved around a lot during his childhood. He points out that he attended 37 schools before settling in Melbourne.

As a teenager, he showed a talent for electronic hacking that attracted the attention of the Australian police. He pleaded guilty to most of the charges against him and paid a fine.

WikiLeaks was founded in 2006 with a group of like-minded activists and information technology experts.

"We are creating a new standard for a free press," Assange told AFP in August 2010.

His legal battles began that same year, shortly after he published secret documents on U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rape allegations against him in Sweden followed, which he continued to deny.

He was in Britain when Sweden sought to extradite him. Ecuador granted him political asylum and allowed him to enter its embassy in London.

Assange lived in a small apartment inside the embassy for seven years, beginning in 2012, where he exercised on a treadmill and used a solar lamp to compensate for the lack of natural light. He compared his situation to living on a space station.

However, his long stay at the embassy ended after a new government that came to power in Quito handed him over to British police in April 2019. He was arrested without bail and imprisoned.

Prosecutors in Sweden closed the investigation against him in connection with the 2019 rape, saying that despite the alleged victim's "credible" testimony, there was not enough evidence to proceed.

But U.S. authorities accused him of violating the U.S. Espionage Act.

He has since been held in Belmarsh, a high-security prison in London, while a lengthy legal battle took place before a decision was made on his extradition.

Assange will appear before a court in the U.S. territory of the Northern Mariana Islands, located in the Pacific Ocean, where he will plead guilty to one count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate information relating to national defense in exchange for his freedom, ending a years-long legal saga.

The deal was announced two weeks before Assange was due to appear in court in Britain to appeal the ruling that ordered his extradition to the United States.

Assange's supporters, including Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei and the late fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, said the charges against Assange were politically motivated.

Roy has repeatedly expressed concern about the physical and psychological effects of his prolonged imprisonment.

The UN Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, Nils Melzer, stated that the "severely escalating suffering to which Assange was subjected" during his detention amounted to torture.

Assange initially supported human rights groups and newspapers that worked with him to edit and publish American war records.

The evidence included a leaked video showing an American Apache military helicopter shooting and killing two journalists and a number of Iraqi civilians on a Baghdad street in 2007.

But many were horrified when WikiLeaks posted unredacted documents on the Internet that included the names of informants. A major dispute erupted between Assange and his media partners.

Lawyers in the United States admitted that they were "aware" of the disappearance of sources after WikiLeaks published their names, but they could not prove that their disappearance was due to WikiLeaks "revealing" the identities of the accused.

Questions have also been raised about Assange's relationship with Russia.

Special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which Donald Trump won, concluded that the Russians "apparently" hacked the campaign messages of then-Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and then "publicly disseminated these materials through various intermediaries, including WikiLeaks." .

Assange is the father of two children with his wife Stella, whom he met when she was a lawyer defending him. Tzu Ja in Belmarsh Prison in March 2022.