By Andrew McKirdy and Harumi Ozawa
SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands, June 26, 2024 (AFP) – A US judge freed Julian Assange on Wednesday in a plea deal that ended years of legal drama for the WikiLeaks founder, long wanted by Washington for revealing military secrets.
“With this pronouncement, it appears that you will be able to walk out of this courtroom a free man,” said the judge in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a Pacific US territory.
Assange had pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defence information, AFP reporters inside the court said.
“Working as a journalist, I encouraged my source to provide material that was said to be classified,” the 52-year-old, dressed in a black suit with a brown tie and his hair slicked back, told the court.
Assange, who from 2010 published hundreds of thousands of secret US documents as head of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks, was released Monday from a high-security British prison.
The judge on Wednesday sentenced him to five years and two months in prison — with credit for the same amount of time he spent behind bars in Britain while fighting extradition to the United States.
Looking tired but relaxed, Assange shared a brief laugh with Kevin Rudd, the Australian ambassador to the United States during a break in proceedings.
Journalists and curious locals, several in colourful Hawaiian shirts, packed the small courtroom. One Saipan resident told AFP he had come to “see the main event”.
The Northern Mariana Islands was chosen because of Assange’s unwillingness to go to the continental United States and because of its proximity to Australia, a court filing said.
After the hearing is done, Assange will fly to Canberra in Australia, WikiLeaks said on social media platform X, adding that the plea bargain “should never have had to happen.”
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the plea deal hearing was a “welcome development”, after his government said Assange’s case had “dragged on for too long” with “nothing to be gained by his continued incarceration”.
– End of an ordeal –
Since 2010 Assange has become a hero to free speech campaigners and a villain to those who thought he had endangered US security and intelligence sources.
US authorities wanted to put Assange on trial for divulging military secrets about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He was indicted by a US federal grand jury in 2019 on 18 counts stemming from WikiLeaks’ publication of a trove of national security documents.
The United Nations hailed Assange’s release, saying the case had raised “a series of human rights concerns”.
Assange’s mother Christine Assange said in a statement carried by Australian media that she was “grateful that my son’s ordeal is finally coming to an end.”
But former US vice president Mike Pence slammed the plea deal on X as a “miscarriage of justice” that “dishonors the service and sacrifice of the men and women of our Armed Forces.”
The announcement of the deal came two weeks before Assange was scheduled to appear in court in Britain to appeal against a ruling that approved his extradition to the United States.
– Extradition battle –
Assange had been detained in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London since April 2019.
He was arrested after spending seven years in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faced accusations of sexual assault that were eventually dropped.
The material he released through WikiLeaks included video showing civilians being killed by fire from a US helicopter gunship in Iraq in 2007. The victims included a photographer and a driver from Reuters.
The United States accused Assange under the 1917 Espionage Act and supporters warned he risked being sentenced to 175 years in prison.
The British government approved his extradition in June 2022 but — in a recent twist — two British judges said in May that he could appeal against the transfer.
The plea deal was not entirely unexpected. US President Joe Biden had been under growing pressure to drop the long-running case against Assange.
The Australian government made an official request to that effect in February and Biden said he would consider it, raising hopes among Assange supporters that his ordeal might end.
