Australian whistleblower and founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange is now a “free man” for American justice, following an agreement which ends on Wednesday a legal saga lasting more than ten years.
“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.
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 on Wednesday a tired but visibly relaxed Julian Assange on the stand.
Dressed in a black suit and an ocher tie, with his hair slicked back, he took his two lawyers in his arms 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,” said one of his lawyers, Jennifer Robinson.
“In a terrible state for five years”
The former computer scientist has been released but is prohibited from returning to the United States without authorization, the US Justice Department announced. The whistleblower had left the United Kingdom, where he had been imprisoned for five years, on Monday to stand trial in federal court in Saipan in the Mariana Islands, a small US territory in the Pacific, after agreeing to plead guilty.
Under the terms of this agreement, he was sentenced to a sentence already covered by the five years served in pre-trial detention. Julian Assange immediately flew to Canberra, the Australian capital.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he was “very satisfied” with the agreement, judging that “the vast majority of Australians were demanding” this release. For his appearance, the whistleblower was accompanied in particular by Kevin Rudd, former Australian Prime Minister and current ambassador to Washington.
Following the agreement, Julian Assange was only prosecuted for “conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information”, according to court documents. “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.
“Not allowed to take a commercial flight”
This South African lawyer has launched an appeal for donations to pay the $520,000 (485,000 euros) 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 Northern Mariana Islands court was chosen because of Julian Assange’s refusal to travel to the US mainland and the territory’s proximity to Australia, according to a court filing.
The United Nations welcomed the release, saying the case had raised “a range of human rights concerns”. “I am grateful that my son’s ordeal is finally coming to an end,” said his mother Christine Assange, in a statement released by Australian media.
VideoJulian Assange “free”: the main dates of a legal saga lasting more than a decade
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”.
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 Assange against his extradition to the United States, approved by the British government in June 2022.
He faced 175 years in prison
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, Julian Assange faced theoretically up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act.
