WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was sentenced Wednesday to 50 weeks in jail.
He was found guilty last month of breaking his bail conditions after he claimed asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden to face sexual assault allegations.
“I did what I thought at the time was the best or perhaps the only thing that I could have done,” Assange said in court, according to the BBC.
Assange also faces an extradition hearing later this week to determine whether he will be brought to the U.S. amid allegations that he conspired with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer network in 2010. An affidavit detailing the alleged crimes was unsealed earlier this month.
The disclosure of a sealed indictment against Assange, which came during special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation, led to speculation that it was related to WikiLeaks’ role in disseminating emails stolen from Democratic officials during the 2016 presidential election. The U.S. intelligence community believes Russian hackers were behind the theft.
But Assange has not been charged in connection with Russian interference in the election nor has he been charged for publishing government secrets contained in the documents leaked by Manning almost a decade ago.
The single-count conspiracy indictment carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison.
[Read more: The myth of Julian Assange]
