Julian Assange files complaint against Nobel Foundation over Machado prize

WikiLeaks laminitis said awarding Venezuela’s absorption person is simply a ‘gross misappropriation’ of funds and risks facilitating warfare crimes.

WikiLeaks laminitis Julian Assange has filed a transgression ailment successful Sweden against the Nobel Foundation, challenging the organisation’s determination to grant its Peace Prize to Venezuelan absorption person Maria Corina Machado.

Assange said this year’s awarding of the prize to Machado represented a “gross misappropriation” of funds and the “facilitation of warfare crimes” nether Swedish law. He added that helium was seeking to frost 11 cardinal Swedish kronor ($1.18m) from being transferred to her arsenic prize money.

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The Nobel Committee awarded Machado the prize successful October for promoting antiauthoritarian rights and warring to execute a peaceful modulation from dictatorship to democracy.

Assange’s transgression complaint, filed connected Wednesday, accuses 30 individuals associated with the Nobel Foundation, including the organisation’s leadership, of misappropriating funds, facilitating warfare crimes and crimes against humanity, and financing crimes of aggression.

By awarding the prize to Machado, “an instrumentality of peace” was converted “into an instrumentality of war”, Assange said successful the complaint, accusing Machado of inciting and endorsing the “commission of planetary crimes” by the United States arsenic it applies subject unit to unit Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro to measurement down.

A contentious selection

Machado’s enactment for the prestigious honour was not without contention aft drafting disapproval for her vocal enactment for Israel during its ongoing genocidal warfare successful Gaza, including successful a telephone telephone with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu soon aft her Nobel triumph was announced successful October.

She has pledged to determination Venezuela’s embassy successful Israel to Jerusalem should she instrumentality office.

Machado has besides expressed enactment for US President Donald Trump’s months-long run against Venezuela’s Maduro, aligning herself with right-wing hawks successful his administration.

Trump officials reason that Maduro has links to transgression cause gangs that airs a nonstop menace to US nationalist information – contempt doubts raised by Washington’s quality assemblage – and person threatened to instrumentality military enactment against Venezuela.

Since September, Trump has ordered much than 20 subject strikes against alleged drug-trafficking vessels successful the Caribbean and disconnected Latin America’s Pacific coast, sidesplitting 104 radical truthful far.

A monolithic deployment of US naval and aerial forces is besides nether mode successful Latin America, arsenic fears turn that Washington could bid an invasion of Venezuela to topple Maduro.

Assange said this week that Machado’s backing of Trump’s subject run “categorically exclude[s]” her from information for the prize arsenic it violates the criteria acceptable retired successful the volition of the award’s founder, Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Nobel.

“The ailment shows that Alfred Nobel’s 1895 volition explicitly mandates that the bid prize spell to the idiosyncratic who during the preceding twelvemonth ‘conferred the top payment to humankind’ by doing ‘the astir oregon the champion enactment for fraternity betwixt nations’,” Assange said.

WikiLeaks besides argued that determination is “real risk” the funds person been oregon volition beryllium “diverted from their charitable intent to facilitate aggression, crimes against humanity, and warfare crimes”.

The Peace Prize is awarded by a Norwegian enactment committee successful Oslo, but Assange argued the Stockholm-based instauration indispensable presume fiscal responsibility. Swedish constabulary confirmed to the AFP quality bureau that they had received the complaint.

Assange founded whistleblowing organisation WikiLeaks successful 2006 and roseate to prominence successful 2010 aft publishing a bid of leaks from US Army quality expert Chelsea Manning.

In 2012, Assange was granted refuge by Ecuador’s London embassy to debar extradition to Sweden, wherever helium faced accusations of intersexual battle that were yet dropped, staying determination for 7 years.

He was past jailed successful London’s high-security Belmarsh situation from 2019 to 2024, arsenic the US authorities sought to extradite him implicit charges helium conspired to hack into US subject databases to get delicate concealed information.

As portion of a US Justice Department plea deal, Assange was released from situation successful the United Kingdom successful 2024 aft pleading blameworthy to a azygous number of violating espionage laws, earlier returning to his autochthonal Australia.