(Saipan) Australian whistleblower and founder of WikiLeaks Julian Assange was declared “free” on Wednesday by the American justice system, following a guilty plea procedure which ends a legal saga lasting more than a decade .
“You will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man,” Judge Ramona V. Manglona said after a quick hearing in U.S. federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands.
“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 ochre tie, with slicked-back hair, Mr Assange hugged his two lawyers and signed a book for one of his supporters, an AFP journalist noted.
The whistleblower left the United Kingdom on Monday, where he had been imprisoned for five years, to be tried before the federal court in Saipan in the Mariana Islands, a small American territory in the Pacific, after having accepted the principle of a plea -guilty.
Under the terms of this agreement, he was sentenced to a sentence already covered by the five years already served in pre-trial detention. Mr. Assange must immediately fly to Canberra, the Australian capital.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese hailed the event as a “welcome development” on Wednesday. The whistleblower was accompanied by Kevin Rudd, a former Australian prime minister and current ambassador to Washington.
Following the agreement, Julian Assange was only charged with “conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defense information,” according to court documents.
“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 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,” said his mother Christine Assange, in a statement released by Australian media.
Former US Vice President Mike Pence called the deal a “false justice” that “dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our armed forces.”
The deal ends a nearly 14-year saga. 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 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 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. response to the deal, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said that because this is an ongoing legal matter, he “did not feel it was appropriate to comment at this time.”
