(Canberra) WikiLeaks founder and whistleblower Julian Assange returned to Australia on Wednesday to enjoy his newfound freedom after a plea deal with the US courts ended a nearly 14-year legal saga.
The private plane transporting him landed on Wednesday evening at Canberra airport, where dozens of journalists were present, an AFP team noted.
His white hair pulled back, the Australian raised his fist as he emerged from the plane, then strode onto the tarmac to kiss his wife Stella, lifting her off the ground, then his father.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Assange, 52, was released after a quick hearing in the US federal court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands. “You will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man,” Judge Ramona V. Manglona told him.
Mr. Assange will not be allowed to return to the United States without authorization, the US Department of Justice said.
In accordance with the agreement reached with the courts, the 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 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 Julian Assange on Wednesday at the bar, tired, but visibly relaxed. He then took his two lawyers in his arms.
He then immediately boarded a plane which left the Mariana Islands, a small American territory in the Pacific, for Canberra.
“The priority now is for Julian to regain his health […] He has been in a terrible state for five years” and wants “to be in contact with nature”, underlined his wife.
His father John Shipton, in an interview with Australian broadcaster ABC, confided his “joy” because his son will be able to “spend quality time with his wife Stella and his two children, walking up and down the beach […] ] and learn to be patient and play with children for several hours – all the beauty of ordinary life.”
“I am grateful that my son’s ordeal is finally coming to an end,” his mother Christine Assange said in a statement.
Julian Assange “has suffered enormously in his fight for freedom of expression, freedom of the press,” said Barry Pollack, his other lawyer. “The work of WikiLeaks will continue and Mr. Assange, I have no doubt, will continue vigorously in his fight for freedom of expression and transparency.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese welcomed a “positive outcome” to Parliament in Canberra that “the vast majority of Australians wanted”.
Under the terms of the agreement, he was now only charged with “conspiracy to obtain and disclose information relating to national defense,” for which he was sentenced to 62 months in prison, already covered by the five years of pretrial detention.
Ms Assange, a South African lawyer, has launched an appeal for donations to pay the $520,000 (C$709,000) her husband owes the Australian government for the charter of the plane that brought him to Australia. He was “not allowed to fly commercially,” she said on X-rated radio.
The Northern Mariana Islands court was chosen because of Mr. Assange’s refusal to travel to the American continent.
The United Nations welcomed the outcome of a case that raised “a range of human rights concerns.”
Former US Vice President Mike Pence, for his part, denounced a “false justice” which “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 Mr. Assange against his extradition to the United States, approved by the British government in June 2022.
He was fighting to avoid being handed over to the American justice system, 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 the documents is a video showing civilians, including a Reuters journalist and his driver, killed by fire from a US combat helicopter in Iraq in July 2007.
Targeted by 18 charges, Mr. Assange theoretically faced up to 175 years in prison.
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 grown for current US President Joe Biden to drop the charges against him, with Australia making a formal request to do so in February.
In the first official U.S. reaction to the deal, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said he did not believe it was “appropriate to comment at this time.”
