WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange walked free on Wednesday from a court on the U.S. Pacific island territory of Saipan after pleading guilty to violating U.S. espionage law in a deal that allowed him to head straight home to Australia.
His release ends a 14-year legal saga in which Assange spent more than five years in a British high-security jail and seven years in asylum at the Ecuadorean embassy in London battling extradition to the U.S., where he faced 18 criminal charges.
During the three-hour hearing, Assange pleaded guilty to one criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified national defence documents but said he had believed the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment, which protects free speech, shielded his activities.
“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.
WHAT IS WIKILEAKS?
On its website, WikiLeaks says it is a multinational media organisation that specialises in analysing and publishing databases of censored or otherwise restricted materials involving wars, spying and corruption.
It was founded by Assange in 2006 and lists several international media organisations among its co-publishers, research partners and funders. It also says that it is a not-for-profit organisation that is funded through public donations.
“WikiLeaks is a giant library of the world’s most persecuted documents,” Assange said of the organisation in an interview with German newspaper Der Spiegel in 2015. “We give asylum to these documents, we analyse them, we promote them and we obtain more.”
The most controversial leaks by WikiLeaks featured classified U.S. military documents and videos from the war it waged in Iraq and Afghanistan in the early to mid 2000s that it said highlighted issues such as abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody, human rights violations and civilian deaths.
U.S. authorities said the leaks were reckless, damaged national security, and endangered the lives of agents. Assange’s many supporters said the site upheld free speech and attempts to prosecute him were an assault on journalism.
WHAT DID WIKILEAKS PUBLISH THAT CAUSED SUCH A STIR?
In April 2010, WikiLeaks released a video showing a 2007 U.S. helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff. In June, a U.S. military specialist named Bradley Manning was arrested for releasing the classified video.
Three months later, WikiLeaks released more than 91,000 documents, most of which were secret U.S. military reports about the war in Afghanistan. That was followed in October by the release of some 400,000 classified U.S. military files chronicling the Iraq war from 2004 to 2009.
The releases were the largest leak of their kind in U.S. military history.
Later that same year, WikiLeaks released thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables that included candid views of foreign leaders and blunt assessments of security threats. These included cables from the former king of Saudi Arabia, Abdullah, repeatedly urging the United States to attack Iran’s nuclear program and others about China directing cyberattacks on the United States.
In the meantime, Assange was fighting against an order by a Swedish court to detain him as a result of an investigation into allegations of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion. He was arrested in December 2010 in Britain on a European warrant. Assange denied the allegations and said from the outset that it was a pretext to extradite him to the United States to face charges over the WikiLeaks releases.
In 2011, WikiLeaks released thousands of previously unpublished U.S. diplomatic cables from its cache of more than 250,000 State Department reports.
WAS WIKILEAKS THE ONLY ONLINE ACTIVIST?
No. A loose grouping of cyber activists supporting WikiLeaks launched a spate of online attacks on organisations seen as hostile to the site, and then after Assange’s arrest in 2010, they started spreading the leaked documents far and wide online.
Another group of internet activists operating under the name “Anonymous” temporarily brought down websites of credit card giants MasterCard and Visa after they had stopped processing donations to WikiLeaks.
Today, the site says it accepts donations in crytocurrencies, including bitcoin.
“I believed the First Amendment protected that activity but I accept that it was … a violation of the espionage statute.”
Chief U.S. District Judge Ramona V. Manglona accepted his guilty plea and released him due to time already served in a British jail.
“We firmly believe that Mr. Assange 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.
WikiLeaks’ work would continue, he said.
His U.K. and Australian lawyer, Jennifer Robinson, thanked the Australian government for its years of diplomacy in securing Assange’s release.
“It is a huge relief to Julian Assange, to his family, to his friends, to his supporters and to us and to everyone who believes in free speech around the world that he can now return home to Australia and be reunited with his family,” she said.
Assange, 52, left the court through a throng of TV cameras and photographers without answering questions, then waved as he got into a white SUV.
He left Saipan on a private jet to the Australian capital Canberra, where he is expected to land around 7:30 p.m. (0930 GMT), according to flight logs.
Assange had agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count, according to filings in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
The U.S. territory in the western Pacific was chosen due to his opposition to travelling to the mainland U.S. and for its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.
Dozens of media from around the world attended the hearing, with more gathered outside the courtroom to cover the proceedings. Media were not allowed inside the courtroom to film the hearing.
“I watch this and think how overloaded his senses must be, walking through the press scrum after years of sensory depravation and the four walls of his high security Belmarsh prison cell,” Stella Assange, the wife of WikiLeaks founder said on social media platform X.
LONG SAGA
Assange 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 accusations of sex crimes in Sweden and battled extradition to the U.S.
While stuck at the embassy he had two sons with his partner, Stella, who had been one of his lawyers. They married in 2022 at the Belmarsh prison in London.
Assange’s supporters view him as a victim because he exposed U.S. wrongdoing and potential crimes, including in conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Washington has said the release of the secret documents put lives in danger.
The Australian government has been advocating for his release and has raised the issue with the United States several times.
“This isn’t something that has happened in the last 24 hours,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told a news conference on Wednesday.
“This is something that has been considered, patient, worked through in a calibrated way, which is how Australia conducts ourselves.”
