(Saipan) Australian whistleblower and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange began appearing Wednesday morning in a court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, which is expected to release him under an agreement with the American justice.
The hearing began shortly after at 9 a.m. local time (Tuesday 7 p.m. Eastern) and Mr. Assange conveniently pleaded guilty to one count relating to obtaining and disclosing information about the national defense, noted an AFP journalist.
Dressed in a black suit and an ocher tie, with slicked back hair, this 52-year-old former Australian computer scientist is being prosecuted for publishing hundreds of thousands of confidential American documents in the 2010s, at the heart of major scandals .
He 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 guilty plea.
Under the terms of this agreement, the sentence that will be handed down will cover his pre-trial detention and Mr. Assange “will be a free man once the agreement (to plead guilty, editor’s note) is validated by the judge,” his wife Stella declared on Tuesday to the BBC. He is due to fly immediately to Canberra, the Australian capital, WikiLeaks said.
For his appearance on Wednesday, 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 charge (“conspiracy to obtain and disclose information relating to national defense”), according to court documents cited by his wife as well as by his ex-accomplice, American soldier Chelsea Manning, at the origin of this massive leak.
“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.
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 told X.
The whistleblower is expected to be sentenced to 62 months in prison, already served on remand in London, which would allow him to return free to his native Australia.
The Northern Mariana Islands court was chosen because of Assange’s refusal to travel to the U.S. 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,” his mother Christine Assange said in a statement carried by Australian media.
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 nearly 14-year saga. It comes as the British courts are set to hear on July 9-10 an appeal by Assange against his extradition to the United States, which the British government approved in June 2022.
He was fighting not to be handed over to American justice, which is 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 counts, Mr. Assange theoretically faced up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act.
Chelsea Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison by court martial in August 2013, but released after seven years after her sentence was commuted by President Barack Obama.
The WikiLeaks founder 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 this effect in February.
In the first official U.S. reaction to the deal, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that because it was an ongoing legal case, it did not seem “appropriate to do for comment at this stage”.
