The whistleblower and founder of WikiLeaks pleaded guilty as part of an agreement with the American justice system this Wednesday, June 26. After being incarcerated for five years in the United Kingdom, he will be able to reunite with his family in Australia.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been released. The 52-year-old whistleblower, who has been imprisoned in the United Kingdom since 2019, appeared in court in Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands, on Wednesday, June 26. He pleaded guilty as part of a plea deal with the U.S. courts.
What were the accusations against Julian Assange, released after 14 years of legal proceedings?
He should soon leave this American territory in the Pacific and return to his native country, Australia, where his family are waiting for him. According to WikiLeaks, a flight is planned in the coming hours, heading to Canberra.
“With this ruling, it appears that you will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man,” Judge Ramona V. Manglona said after the whistleblower pleaded guilty.
Dressed in a black suit and an ocher tie, with slicked back hair, this former computer scientist, aged 52, was prosecuted for having published hundreds of thousands of confidential American documents in the 2010s, at the heart of major scandals.
“The priority now is for Julian to get healthy again,”
“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.
The whistleblower left the United Kingdom on Monday, where he had been imprisoned for five years, to be tried before the American federal court in Saipan in the Mariana Islands, a small American territory in the Pacific, after having accepted the principle of a to plead guilty.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said this Wednesday that the imminent outcome of the case was a “welcome development”.
For his appearance, the whistleblower was greeted by cameras. He was accompanied in particular by Kevin Rudd, former Australian Prime Minister and current ambassador to Washington.
Following the agreement, Julian Assange is only being prosecuted for a single count (“conspiracy to obtain and disclose information relating to national defense”), according to court documents cited by his wife as well as by Chelsea Manning .
“The priority now is that Julian regains his health”, “he has been in a terrible state for five years” and wishes “to be in contact with nature”, underlined Stella Assange.
