Julian Assange has landed back in his native Australia after entering a guilty plea at a U.S. District Court in the Northern Mariana Islands.
The Wikileaks founder pled guilty to one count of illegally disseminating national security material in a deal with the U.S. Justice Department, in exchange for his freedom after five years of incarceration in the UK.
Assange gestured towards photographers after touching down at Canberra Airport today and was embraced by his family, who along with friends and politicians have been campaigning for his release.
“Julian needs time to recover, to get used to freedom,” his wife Stella Assange said at a news conference soon after, according to the BBC.
Assange has spent five years in a UK prison as he fought extradition to the U.S. after publishing a series of leaks that were provided to him by former intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. The 2010 dump of more than 500,000 secret government, military and diplomatic documents and other reports connected to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan caused huge reverberations around the world.
Since the publication, he has faced a litany of legal issues, including a sexual assault allegation in Sweden that led to a Europe-wide arrest warrant. He took asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy between 2012 and 2019, but was taken to HMP Belmarsh for breaking UK bail condition law and was then hit with another conspiracy charge by the U.S., keeping him in jail as he fought extradition.
A letter released by the U.S. Department of Justice before his release this week stated he would be tried on the single charge of conspiring to unlawfully obtain and disseminate classified information relating to the national defense of the U.S. under the Section 793 Espionage Act and be sentenced for that offense.
U.S. prosecutors had accused Assange of conspiring with Manning to hack into a Pentagon computer and then release classified diplomatic cables and military files. Manning pled guilty to multiple charges in 2013 and spent seven years in jail overall before President Barack Obama commuted the sentence in 2017.
Assange faced 17 counts of espionage and one count of computer misuse under the U.S. Espionage Act. His lawyers feared he faced up to 175 years in prison if convicted, while U.S. authorities said the sentence would be much shorter.
He always denied the allegations against him, and his supporters have said the leaks were in the public interest.
Journalism organizations worldwide will see the outcome as a blow, having campaigned against a prosecution under the U.S. Espionage Act that they see as a serious blow to press freedom.
Assange’s lawyer, Jen Robinson, said the plea deal was “criminalisation of journalism” and set a “dangerous precedent, while Stella Assange said the conviction posed a threat to “newsgathering and publishing information that was in the public interest.”
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