What if we finally reached the last chapter? After years of legal saga, Julian Assange was finally released from prison in the United Kingdom. On Tuesday June 25, the founder of WikiLeaks headed to a US federal court in the Pacific where he must plead guilty to a single count of illegally obtaining and disclosing information relating to national security in exchange for his release. The end of a long and bitter confrontation with the United States.
Under the terms of this agreement, “Julian Assange is free” and left the United Kingdom and the high security prison near London, where he had been incarcerated since 2019, to board a private plane at Stansted Airport, a clarified WikiLeaks, welcoming the fact that he could find his wife Stella Assange and their children, as a “result of a global campaign”.
Northern Mariana Islands
© / afp.com/Nicholas SHEARMAN
He will appear in court in the Mariana Islands
Prosecuted for exposing hundreds of thousands of confidential documents, this 52-year-old Australian must appear on Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. local time (Tuesday 11:00 p.m. GMT) in federal court in the Mariana Islands, a US Pacific territory, according to court documents released public during the night from Monday to Tuesday. “This unusual location reflects Assange’s reluctance to voluntarily return to the continental United States,” comments the American online media Politico. Note that these islands are much closer to Julian Assange’s native Australia, of which he is a citizen, than to the courts of the continental United States or Hawaii.
Targeted by 18 charges, he theoretically faced up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act. Under the deal detailed in court documents made public Monday night, he would be sentenced to just over five years in prison — but would be eligible for immediate release, because that’s about how long he’s been been imprisoned in England while fighting extradition to the United States. “Julian Assange was confined in a cell for 23 hours a day, eating his meals off a tray alone, surrounded by 232 pounds and allowed only one hour a day to exercise in a prison yard,” according to a story published in the American weekly The Nation This year.
The end of a long saga
This agreement puts an end to a saga of almost 14 years. He intervened as British justice was due to examine, on July 9 and 10, an appeal by Julian Assange against his extradition to the United States, approved by the United Kingdom government 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 two Reuters journalists, killed by fire from an American combat helicopter in Iraq in July 2007.
The founder of WikiLeaks 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 presented an official request to this effect last February which Joe Biden said he was examining, raising hope among his supporters. “The case has been a diplomatic headache for the Biden administration, which has faced pressure from Australia, a key national security ally, to end years of legal limbo Assange”, underlines Politico.
For his part, THE New York Times wrote that his release “was not unexpected” assuring that President Biden was open “to a speedy resolution.” In 2022, the daily called – with the Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Der Spiegel – the US government to drop certain criminal charges against Assange that accused him of breaking the law by publishing classified information.