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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange finally returns home after US legal battle ends

26 Jun 2024

Julian Assange raises his fist after arriving at Canberra Airport on Wednesday, after he pleaded guilty at a US court in Saipan. AFP

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange landed to an ecstatic welcome in Australia on Wednesday after pleading guilty to violating US espionage law in a deal that sets him free from a 14-year legal battle.

Assange landed on a chilly Canberra evening in a private jet, the final act of an international drama that led him from a five-year stretch in the high-security Belmarsh prison in Britain to a courtroom in a US Pacific island territory and, finally, home.

His white hair swept back, the Australian raised a fist as he emerged from the plane door, striding across the tarmac to give a hug to his wife Stella that lifted her off the ground and then to embrace his father.

Assange has not spoken publicly since being released and did not appear at a Wikileaks press conference at a hotel in Canberra, where Stella Assange said it was too soon to say what her husband would do next.

“Julian needs time to recover, to get used to freedom,” she said. “I want Julian to have that space to rediscover that freedom. ”She added she believed her husband would one day be pardoned.

The plane carrying Julian Assange arrives at Canberra Airport in Canberra on Wednesday. AFP

Australia Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who has lobbied for years to free Assange, said he had spoken to him by phone after his plane landed. “I had a very warm discussion with him this evening, he was very generous in his praise of the Australian government’s efforts,” Albanese told an earlier press conference.

Those charges stemmed from WikiLeaks’ release in 2010 of hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — one of the largest breaches of secret information in US history.

During a three-hour hearing held earlier in the US territory of Saipan, Assange pleaded guilty to one criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defence documents. “Working as a journalist I encouraged my source to provide information that was said to be classified in order to publish that information,” he told the court. “I believed the First Amendment protected that activity but I accept that it was...a violation of the espionage statute.”

Chief US District Judge Ramona V. Manglona accepted his guilty plea, noting that the US government indicated there was no personal victim from Assange’s actions. She wished Assange, who turns 53 on July 3, an early happy birthday as she released him due to time already served in a British jail.

The US government viewed Assange as reckless for putting its agents at risk of harm by publishing their names, his supporters hailed him as a hero for promoting free speech and exposing war crimes.

"We firmly believe that Mr Assanger never should have been charged under the Espionage Act and engaged in (an) exercise that journalists engage in every day," his U.S. lawyer, Barry Pollack, told reporters outside the court. He said WikiLeaks' work would continue.

Assanger's British and Australian lawyer Jennifer Robinson thanked the Australian government for securing Assanger's release. His father, John Shipton, told Reuters he was relieved.
"That Julian can come home to Australia and see his family regularly and do the ordinary things of life is a treasure," Shipton said in Canberra, where he was waiting for his son. "The beauty of the ordinary is the essence of life."

Assanger had agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count, according to filings in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.

"That is a really alarming precedent. It is the sort of thing we'd expect in an authoritarian or totalitarian country," said Andrew Wilkie, an independent lawmaker who led a parliamentary group advocating for Assanger.

Assanger spent more than five years in what Judge Manglona called one of Britain's harshest prisons and seven years holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London as he fought extradition.

Reuters