It is a very long legal standoff which has just ended between Julian Assange and the United States. The founder of WikiLeaks was declared “free” this Wednesday by the American justice system, following a guilty plea procedure.
“You will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man,” Judge Ramona V. Manglona said after a quick hearing in the U.S. federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands. Julian Assange then left the court without making a statement. A private jet carrying him has since taken off from this territory, heading to Canberra, the Australian capital, according to WikiLeaks.
“I encouraged my source”
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 information on the National Defense. “I encouraged my source”, the American soldier Chelsea Manning, at the origin of this massive leak, “to provide material which was classified”, admitted a tired but visibly relaxed Julian Assange on the stand.
Dressed in a black suit and an ocher tie, his hair slicked back, the Australian whistleblower took his two lawyers in his arms. He left the United Kingdom on Monday, where he had been imprisoned for five years, to be tried before the federal court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a small American territory, after accepting the principle of a guilty plea. Under the terms of this agreement, he was sentenced to a sentence already covered by the five years already served in pre-trial detention.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese welcomed a “welcome development” on Wednesday. For his appearance, the whistleblower was accompanied in particular by Kevin Rudd, former Australian Prime Minister and current ambassador to Washington.
A call for donations for his return to Australia
“The priority now is for Julian to regain his health”, “he has been in a terrible state for five years” and wishes “to be in contact with nature”, underlined Stella Assange. This South African lawyer has launched an appeal for donations to pay the $520,000 that her husband must reimburse the Australian government for chartering the plane that will take her to Australia. He was “not allowed to take a commercial flight”, she said on X. The United Nations also welcomed this release, saying that the case had raised “a series of human rights concerns “.
Everything you need to know about the Assange affair
Former US Vice President Mike Pence called the agreement “false justice” which “dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our armed forces”. Targeted by 18 charges, Julian Assange theoretically faced up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act.
