WikiLeaks founder and whistleblower Julian Assange returned to Australia on Wednesday to enjoy his newfound freedom, after an agreement with the American justice system which ended a legal saga of nearly 14 years.
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.
During a press conference, Mr.me Assange then explained that her husband needed privacy and time to recover after more than five years in a high-security prison in London.
“He needs time, he needs to recover and it’s a process,” she said, appearing on the verge of tears. “I ask you, please, to give us space, to give us privacy (…), to let our family be family before he can speak again, at the time of his choice “.
Earlier in the day, Mr. Assange, 52, was released after a quick hearing in the U.S. federal court in Saipan, 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.
Under the agreement, the former computer scientist, accused of making public hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. documents in the 2010s, pleaded guilty to obtaining and disclosing national defense information.
“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 left the court without making any statements. “Today is a historic day. It puts an end to 14 years of legal battles,” said his lawyer Jennifer Robinson.
“Suffered enormously”
He then immediately boarded a plane which left the Mariana Islands, a small American territory in the Pacific, for Canberra.
His father John Shipton, in an interview with the Australian broadcaster ABC, confided his “joy” because his son will be able to “spend quality time with his wife Stella and his two children, walk 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 responded in a statement.
Julian Assange “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 vigorously continue his fight for freedom of expression and transparency.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese welcomed a “positive result” that “the vast majority of Australians wanted”.
The whistleblower left the United Kingdom on Monday, where he had been imprisoned for five years, after accepting the principle of a guilty plea.
Under the terms of this agreement, he was only prosecuted for the sole charge of “conspiracy to obtain and disclose information relating to national defense”, for which he was sentenced to a sentence of 62 months in prison, already covered by his five years of pre-trial detention.
Call for donations
Mme Assange has appealed for donations to pay the $520,000 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 explained on X.
The Northern Mariana Islands court was chosen because of Mr Assange’s refusal to travel to the US mainland.
The United Nations welcomed the outcome of a case that had raised “a range of human rights concerns”.
The agreement 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 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 them, 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, Mr. Assange theoretically faced up to 175 years in prison.
Chelsea Manning, sentenced in 2013 to 35 years in prison by a court martial, was 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 in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden in a rape investigation, which was closed 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 do so in February.
In a first official US reaction, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said it did not seem “appropriate to comment at this time.”
