Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange gets sentenced to 50 weeks in jail

Julian Assange, the co-founder of Wikileaks, has been sentenced to 50 weeks in jail by a UK court for violating his bail conditions.

Assange was arrested last month and removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London by police.

His sentence was given this morning at Southwark Crown Court in London.

Assange read a letter to the court during his sentencing in which he said he’d been “struggling with difficult circumstances,” per a BBC report.

“I did what I thought at the time was the best or perhaps the only thing that I could have done,” Assange said.

Assange was charged by the US Department of Justice with “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified US government computer,” following his recent arrest.

He founded Wikileaks, an organisation that “specializes in the analysis and publication of large datasets of censored or otherwise restricted official materials involving war, spying and corruption,” in 2006.