Julian Assange files complaint against Nobel Foundation over Machado Prize | Julian Assange News
The founder of WikiLeaks said rewarding Venezuela’s opposition leader was a “blatant misappropriation” of funds and risked facilitating war crimes.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has filed a criminal complaint in Sweden against the Nobel Foundation, challenging the organization’s decision to award its peace prize to Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado.
Assange said this year’s awarding of the prize to Machado represented a “blatant misappropriation” of funds and a “facilitation of war crimes” under Swedish law. He added that he was seeking to prevent 11 million Swedish crowns ($1.18 million) from being transferred to him as a prize.
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The Nobel Committee awarded Machado the prize in October for his promotion of democratic rights and his fight for a peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.
Assange’s criminal complaint, filed Wednesday, accuses 30 people associated with the Nobel Foundation, including the organization’s leaders, of embezzlement, facilitating war crimes and crimes against humanity, and financing crimes of aggression.
By awarding the prize to Machado, “an instrument of peace” was transformed “into an instrument of war,” Assange said in the complaint, accusing Machado of instigating and approving the “commission of international crimes” by the United States as it exerts military pressure to force Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro to resign.
A controversial selection
Machado’s selection for the prestigious honor was not without controversy after drawing criticism for his vocal support of Israel during its ongoing genocidal war in Gaza, including during a phone call with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shortly after his Nobel Prize announcement in October.
She has pledged to move Venezuela’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem if she takes office.
Machado also expressed support for US President Donald Trump’s months-long campaign against Maduro in Venezuela, aligning himself with his administration’s right-wing hawks.
Trump officials say Maduro has ties to criminal drug gangs that pose a direct threat to U.S. national security – despite doubts raised by Washington’s intelligence community – and have threatened to take military action against Venezuela.
Since September, Trump has ordered more than 20 military strikes against suspected drug-trafficking ships in the Caribbean and off Latin America’s Pacific coast, killing 104 people so far.
A massive deployment of US naval and air forces is also underway in Latin America, as fears grow that Washington could order an invasion of Venezuela to topple Maduro.
Assange said this week that Machado’s support for Trump’s military campaign ‘categorically excludes'[s]» she was excluded from consideration for the prize because it violated the criteria set out in the will of the prize’s founder, Swedish inventor and industrialist Alfred Nobel.
“The complaint shows that Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will explicitly requires that the Peace Prize be awarded to the individual who, during the preceding year, has ‘conferred the greatest benefit to humanity’ by doing ‘the most or best work for the brotherhood among nations,'” Assange said.
WikiLeaks also argued that there is a “real risk” that the funds have been or will be “diverted from their charitable purpose to facilitate aggression, crimes against humanity and war crimes.”
The Peace Prize is awarded by a Norwegian selection committee in Oslo, but Assange has argued that the Stockholm-based foundation should take financial responsibility. Swedish police confirmed to the AFP news agency that they had received the complaint.
Assange founded the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks in 2006 and rose to prominence in 2010 after publishing a series of leaks from U.S. military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
In 2012, Assange was granted refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced sexual assault charges that were eventually dropped and remained there for seven years.
He was then imprisoned at the high security Belmarsh prison in London from 2019 to 2024, as the US government sought to extradite him on charges that he conspired to hack US military databases to acquire sensitive secret information.
As part of a US Justice Department plea deal, Assange was released from prison in the UK in 2024 after pleading guilty to a single count of violating espionage laws, before returning to his native Australia.
