GROWING calls have been made for a presidential pardon for Edward Snowden after President Barack Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning, the army soldier who shared classified documents with Wikileaks.

The outgoing US President’s decision over the whistleblower was one of his last acts at the White House before Donald Trump succeeds him on Friday.

Ms Manning had been two years into a 35-year sentence at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for disclosing classified and sensitive information to Wikileaks – is now set to go free on May 17.

She had attempted suicide twice since being sentenced in 2013 and had repeatedly asked for better treatment for her gender dysphoria.

It had been thought that Ms Manning had been on a shortlist for commutation but it was presumed that the incoming president, Donald Trump, would be unlikely to look favourably on her case and that under him her sentence would be left to run its course.

The Herald:

Obama was heckled at one gathering after the sentencing.

Now the attention has turned to Mr Snowden, who was installed as rector at the university in 2014. 

Mr Snowden, the Rector of the University of Glasgow, was charged with espionage and has been living in exile in Russia since leaking classified documents related to US and UK surveillance in 2013.

Last week it emerged he had asked the outgoing president to grant Chelsea Manning clemency over himself, despite having spent months campaigning to get a presidential pardon.

The former intelligence analyst wrote on Twitter: "Mr President, if you grant only one act of clemency as you exit the White House, please: free Chelsea Manning. You alone can save her life."

Now Human Rights Watch has said: "Snowden should be next."

The group had said that Manning and Snowden should be pardoned as part of a reversal of the administration’s lamentable record on prosecution of leaks.

Dinah PoKempner, general counsel of Human Rights Watch explained in a blog last week that Snowden’s disclosures to respected journalists were deliberately chosen to "expose an illegal surveillance regime that had metastasized without strong executive or legislative oversight".

The Herald:

She said: "He required the journalists to use their judgment to publish only what was in the public interest, avoid harm to innocent people, and consider the government’s views on whether their stories posed unacceptable harm to national security.

"Snowden wound up in Russia, not by choice, but because his onward passage was made impossible when the US cancelled his passport... If he returns, he will face prosecution under the same unfair law Manning did, unable to defend his acts by arguing they were in the public interest, as international law requires.

"No possible interest is served by maintaining his exile in Russia. Certainly the public’s interest in protecting future whistleblowers is not."

Manning had said that the petition she made to Obama in November was “the last real chance to make my case to go home for a very long time”.

She said that the appeal she filed against her sentence last May would take many years to work its way through the courts.