by Minwoo Park
SAIPAN, Northern Mariana Islands (Reuters) – WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange arrived in his native Australia on Wednesday after being freed from custody following a plea bargain with the U.S. authorities, ending a long legal saga.
He landed at Canberra airport shortly after 7:30 p.m. (1130 GMT), greeting gathered journalists before hugging his wife, Stella, and then his father.
The Australian national, aged 52, pleaded guilty earlier in the day to violating the US espionage law in a court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a Pacific archipelago belonging to the United States, during a hearing at the end of which he was declared free by the judge.
This is the epilogue of a long legal saga for Julian Assange, whom the United States wanted to bring to justice for having “leaked” tens of thousands of classified American documents in 2010.
The WikiLeaks founder had been fighting his extradition to the United States for years, taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London before being arrested and detained in 2019 in a high-security British prison.
During the three-hour hearing on Wednesday morning, Assange pleaded guilty to conspiracy to obtain and disclose classified U.S. documents. He said, however, that he believed his activities were protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which establishes freedom of speech.
“As a journalist, I encouraged my source to provide information that was classified in order to publish that information,” he said in court.
“I thought the First Amendment protected this activity but I accept that it was … a violation” of the Espionage Act.
In a plea agreement made public Monday by U.S. prosecutors, U.S. District Judge Ramona V. Manglona accepted Assange’s guilty plea and declared him “free” from time already served in a British prison.
Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who spoke with Julian Assange after his arrival in Canberra, thanked the United States and the United Kingdom on Wednesday for their efforts in freeing the founder of WikiLeaks.
(Minwoo Park, with Renju Jose in Sydney; French version Jean Terzian and Blandine Hénault, edited by Claude Chendjou)
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