V“You will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man.”, Judge Ramona V. Manglona said at the end of a quick hearing in the US federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands. Mr. Assange will not have the right to return to the United States without authorization, the American Department of Justice said in a press release.
In accordance with an agreement reached with the courts, the 52-year-old former computer scientist, accused of having published hundreds of thousands of confidential American documents in the 2010s, pleaded guilty to obtaining and disclosing defense information national.
A historic liberation
“I encouraged my source”the American soldier Chelsea Manning, at the origin of this massive leak, “to provide material that was classified”, recognized Julian Assange on Wednesday at the bar, tired but visibly relaxed. Mr. Assange hugged his two lawyers and signed a book for one of his supporters, noted an AFP journalist.
He then left the court in full view of the cameras, without making a statement. “Today is a historic day. It puts an end to 14 years of legal battles”welcomed his lawyer Jennifer Robinson.
He immediately boarded a private plane which left the Mariana Islands, a small American territory in the Pacific, for Canberra, the Australian capital, where he is expected in the evening. “The priority now is that Julian regains his health (…) He has been in a terrible state for five years” and wishes “be in contact with nature”underlined his wife, Stella Assange, who said she could not “stop crying” of joy since the announcement of his release.
His father John Shipton, in an interview with the Australian broadcaster ABC, confided his « joie » because his son will be able “spending quality time with his wife Stella and two children, walking up and down the beach (…) and learning to be patient and play with children for several hours – all the beauty of ordinary life”.
The ordeal “finally comes to an end”
Julian Assange “suffered enormously in his fight for freedom of expression, freedom of the press”underlined Barry Pollack, his other lawyer. “The work of WikiLeaks will continue and Mr. Assange, I have no doubt, will vigorously continue his fight for freedom of expression and transparency”. “I am grateful that my son’s ordeal is finally coming to an end”said his mother Christine Assange, in a statement to Australian media.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese congratulated Parliament in Canberra on “positive result” what “the vast majority of Australians wanted”. The whistleblower left the United Kingdom on Monday, where he had been imprisoned for five years, after accepting the principle of a guilty plea. Under the terms of this agreement, he was only prosecuted for the sole charge of “conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information”for which he was sentenced to 62 months in prison, already covered by the five years of pre-trial detention.
Ms. Assange, a South African lawyer, launched an appeal for donations to pay the 520,000 dollars (485,000 euros) that her husband must reimburse the Australian government for the charter of the plane which takes him to Australia. He has not “not allowed to take a commercial flight”she indicated on X. The court in the Northern Mariana Islands was chosen because of Mr. Assange’s refusal to go to the American continent.
An agreement that ends 14 years of legal battles
The United Nations welcomed the outcome of a case which had raised “a range of human rights concerns”. Former American Vice President Mike Pence, for his part, denounced “false justice” Who “dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our armed forces”. The agreement ends a saga of almost 14 years. It came as British justice was due to examine, on July 9 and 10, an appeal by Mr. Assange against his extradition to the United States, approved by the British government in June 2022.
He was fighting not to be handed over to American justice which was pursuing him for having made public since 2010 more than 700,000 confidential documents on American military and diplomatic activities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among these documents is a video showing civilians, including a Reuters journalist and his driver, killed by fire from an American combat helicopter in Iraq in July 2007.
Targeted by 18 charges, Mr. Assange theoretically faced up to 175 years in prison. Chelsea Manning, sentenced in 2013 to 35 years in prison by a court martial, was released after seven years after her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama. The founder of WikiLeaks was arrested by British police in April 2019, after seven years spent in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden in a rape investigation, dismissed the same year.
Since then, calls have increased for current US President Joe Biden to drop the charges against him. Australia made a formal request to do so in February. In the first official US reaction to the deal, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that because it was an ongoing legal case, he did not believe “not appropriate to comment at this stage.”
