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julian assange
Assange Sues Nobel Foundation to Stop War-Promoting Machado From Receiving Peace Prize Cash
"Alfred Nobel's endowment for peace cannot be spent on the promotion of war."
Dec 17, 2025
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Wednesday filed a complaint against the Nobel Foundation to stop its planned payouts to Venezuelan opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado, who has backed US President Donald Trump's campaign of military aggression against her own country.
According to a press release that WikiLeaks posted to X, Assange's lawsuit seeks to block Machado from obtaining over USD $1 million she's due to receive from the Nobel Foundation as winner of this year's Peace Prize.
The complaint notes that Alfred Nobel's will states that the Peace Prize named after him should only be awarded to those who have "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind” by doing “the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies, and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses."
In an interview that aired on Sunday on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Machado praised Trump’s policies of tightening economic sanctions and seizing Venezuelan oil tankers, acts of aggression that appear to go against Nobel's stated declaration that the Peace Prize winner must promote "fraternity between nations."
“Look, I absolutely support President Trump’s strategy, and we, the Venezuelan people, are very grateful to him and to his administration, because I believe he is a champion of freedom in this hemisphere,” Machado told CBS News.
Trump’s campaign against Venezuela has not only included sanctions and the seizing of an oil tanker, but a series of bombings of purported drug trafficking vessels that many legal experts consider to be acts of murder.
In his complaint, Assange claims that Machado's gushing praise of Trump in the wake of his illegal boat-bombing campaign is enough to justify the Nobel Foundation freezing its disbursements to the Venezuelan politician.
"Alfred Nobel's endowment for peace cannot be spent on the promotion of war," Assange states, adding that "Machado has continued to incite the Trump Administration to pursue its escalatory path" against her own country.
The complaint also argues that there's a risk that funds awarded to Machado will be "diverted from their charitable purpose to facilitate aggression, crimes against humanity, and war crimes."
Were this to happen, the complaint alleges, it would violate Sweden's obligations under Article 25(3)(c) of the Rome Statute, which states that anyone who "aids, abets, or otherwise assists" in the commission of a war crime shall be subject to prosecution under the International Criminal Court.
Trump in recent days has ramped up his aggressive actions against Venezuela, and on Tuesday night he announced a "total and complete blockade" of all "sanctioned oil tankers" seeking to enter and leave the country.
“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before.”
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Biden's Clemency Clock Winds Down for Donziger, Littlejohn, Peltier, and Assange
There are only a few days left for Biden to heed calls for clemency coming from a diverse array of rights groups.
Jan 17, 2025
Outgoing U.S. President Joe Biden announced commutations on Friday for approximately 2,500 people who have been convicted of non-violence drug crimes—a move that was cheered by rights groups and brings his total number of pardons and commutations to the highest of any president.
But Biden has so far stopped short of granting clemency to a number of high profile individuals whose cases—while all very different—have generated significant public interest and sympathy. They include: the former IRS contractor Charles Littlejohn, the environmental lawyer Steven Donziger, Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The cases have prompted a flurry of calls from various groups for Biden to take action on the cases before he hands over the White House to President-elect Donald Trump on January 20.
Littlejohn was sentenced in January 2024 to the five years in prison for unauthorized disclosure of tax information to the media. In 2020, The New York Times published a story based on information leaked by Littlejohn revealing that Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes the year he won the presidency and in 2017. Later, journalists at ProPublica used documents made available by Littlejohn to report on how the wealthiest 25 individuals in America were able to get away with paying very little in income tax between 2014 and 2018.
Given the nature of his case, Kenny Stancil of the Revolving Door Project and Bob Lord of the Institute for Policy Studies, wrote in December that Littlejohn "very well could be on Trump's enemies list" and urged Biden to commute his sentence.
"The longer Littlejohn languishes in jail, the more he is at risk of retribution from Trump," wrote Stancil and Lord, who also highlight that Littlejohn was given the statutory maximum sentence for his crime.
On Thursday, millionaire Abigail Disney penned a defense of Littlejohn, writing that Biden should commute his sentence because he "did the nation a great service by spotlighting the urgent need for tax reform in a country being ripped apart by extreme and rising inequality."
Indigenous leaders and the human rights organization Amnesty International are calling for clemency for another man who is currently behind bars: the Indigenous rights activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted in 1977 of having murdered two FBI agents and has spent the majority of his life in prison, despite concerns about the fairness of his trial and conviction.
Peltier had his request for parole and compassionate release denied last year, meaning clemency is "likely his only chance for freedom," according to Amnesty International.
"All of us see a little bit of ourselves in Leonard Peltier, and that's why we fight so hard for him," said Nick Tilsen, the founder and CEO of NDN Collective, an Indigenous rights group. "This is about paving a path forward that gives us the opportunity to have justice and begin to heal the relationship between the United States government and Indian people. And so, this decision is massive."
Meanwhile, 50 human rights and environmental groups sent a letter in early January to President Biden, urging him to pardon U.S. human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, who secured a multibillion settlement for Indigenous plaintiffs against Texaco (later acquired by Chevron) in an Ecuadoran court over the company's destructive oil pollution in the Amazon, but was later charged with criminal contempt of court in the U.S. for withholding evidence in a countersuit brought by Chevron. Donziger was disbarred in 2018, and then spent time in both prison and under house arrest.
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who has called for Donziger's pardon, recently told Democracy Now! that "Chevron has spent countless millions and millions of dollars going after Steven Donziger and not helping a single person in Ecuador deal with what they left behind. We have to stand up to corporate excesses in this country."
"If President Biden would pardon him, I think that would be a signal that maybe things are beginning to change," he added.
Also this week, press freedom and civil liberties organizations demanded that Biden pardon WikiLeaks founder and publisher Julian Assange, who last year—as a way to avoid extradition to the U.S. after languishing for years in a British prison—pleaded guilty to a felony charge under the U.S. Espionage Act of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national military documents. Per the terms of the plea deal, he was allowed to return to his native Australia and is no longer incarcerated.
Freedom of the Press Foundation director of advocacy Seth Stern said in a statement Thursday that Assange's case "normalized the criminalization of work national security journalists do every day—talking to sources, obtaining documents from them, and publishing those documents."
"A pardon won't undo the harm the case has done to the free press or the chilling effect on journalists who now know their work can land them behind bars at the whim of the Department of Justice. But it will help reduce the damage," he said.
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To Thwart Trump Killing Spree, Biden Urged to Commute Death Penalty Cases
The former president, warned a broad rights coalition, "executed more people than the previous ten administrations combined."
Dec 09, 2024
A large and diverse coalition of broad coalition of rights organizations on Monday sent a letter to U.S. President Biden Monday, urging him to commute the sentences of all 40 individuals who are on federal death row.
The letter adds to a chorus of voices—including prosecutors and law enforcement officials—advocating for Biden to use his clemency powers to issue such commutations before he departs office.
The calls for Biden to issue pardons and commutations have only grown since the president issued a pardon for his son, clearing Hunter Biden of wrongdoing in any federal crimes he committed or may have committed in the last 11 years.
The joint letter to Biden was backed by over 130 organizations, including the ACLU, Brennan Center for Justice, and The Sentencing Project, commends his administration's "actions to repudiate capital punishment, including imposing a moratorium on executions for those sentenced to death, and for publicly calling for an end to the use of the death penalty during your 2020 campaign. In the face of a second Trump administration, more is necessary."
"President Trump executed more people than the previous ten administrations combined. Of those he executed, over half were people of color: six Black men and one Native American. The only irreversible action you can take to prevent President-elect Trump from renewing his execution spree, as he has vowed to do, is commuting the death sentences of those on federal death row now," the letter states.
The letter cites additional reasons that Biden ought to commute the sentences, including that the death penalty "has been rooted in slavery, lynchings, and white vigilantism."
A separate letter to Biden—sent in November by group of attorneys general, law enforcement officials, and others—argues that "condemning people to death by the state does not advance public safety. The death penalty fails as an effective deterrent and does not reduce crime. As an outdated, error-riddled, and racially-biased practice, its continued use—and the potential for its abuse—erodes public trust in the criminal legal system and undermines the legitimacy of the entire criminal legal system."
Matt Bruenig, president of the People's Policy Project think tank, directly tied Biden's inaction on this issue to the pardon he issued for his son in a blog post last week, writing that "if Biden does not act, there is little doubt that Trump will aggressively schedule executions in his next term. Their blood will primarily be on Trump's hands, but, if Biden does not act to prevent it, his hands will be bloody too."
The call for commutations for death row prisoners aligns with a wider push for the President to use his clemency powers before he leaves office.
Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), who has been particularly vocal on this issue, said Sunday on social media that President Biden "must use his clemency power to change lives for the better. And we have some ideas on who he can target: Folks in custody with unjustified sentencing disparities, the elderly and chronically ill, people on death row, women punished for crimes of their abusers, and more."
Pressley was one of over 60 members of Congress who sent a letter to Biden last month, encouraging Biden to intervene to help these groups.
Several lawmakers have specific pardons or commutations in mind, according to Axios. For example, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has urged Biden to pardon Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has called for a pardon of Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, per Axios.
So far, Biden has granted far fewer clemency petitions (161 total) than former President Barrack Obama, according to the Department of Justice's Office of the Pardon Attorney, and a few dozen less than President-elect Trump did during his entire first presidency. However, in 2022, Biden did grant full and unconditional pardons to all U.S. citizens convicted of simple federal marijuana possession—a move that was cheered by advocates.
According to The New York Times, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said last week that Biden was expected to make more clemency announcements "at the end of his term."
"He's thinking through that process very thoroughly," she said.
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