WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has touched down in his native Australia and been reunited with his family after pleading guilty to a spying charge as part of a plea deal with US authorities, following his release from prison.
Waving to photographers and supporters after he flew into the country’s capital Canberra on Wednesday, Assange returned to Australia in the final act of an extraordinary few days following his dramatic release from a London jail.
The 52-year-old had appeared before a judge in the US territory of the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific just after midnight, before pleading guilty to a single felony charge after the US dropped 17 other espionage charges against him. He admitted to his role in the conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act and was sentenced to time already served in a British prison.
Wearing a dark coloured suit, Assange did not answer questions from reporters on the short walk into and out of the court.
Speaking outside court after the hearing, Assange’s US lawyer Barry Pollack said his prosecution was “unprecedented” and the WikiLeaks founder “suffered tremendously in his fight for free speech”.
Pollack said: “The prosecution of Julian Assange is unprecedented in the 100 years of the Espionage Act, it has never been used by the United States to pursue a publisher, a journalist, like Mr Assange.
"Mr Assange revealed truthful, important and newsworthy information, including revealing that the United States had committed war crimes, and he has suffered tremendously in his fight for free speech, for freedom of the press, and to ensure that the American public and the world community gets truthful and important, newsworthy information.”
He added that they “firmly believe that Mr Assange never should have been charged under the Espionage Act”.
The court hearing followed his dramatic release from Belmarsh Prison in London on Monday where he has spent five years, largely in solitary confinement, fighting extradition. Assange left the UK on Monday evening and flew to Saipan via Bangkok after the plea deal was signed on June 19.
His imprisonment followed the publication of hundreds of thousands of leaked documents relating to the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, which prompted 14 years of legal battles.
Here is what we know about Assange's release from prison.
Who is Julian Assange?
Born in Townsville, Australia, in 1971, Assange developed an interest in computers from a young age and gained a reputation as a sophisticated programmer in his teens.
In 1995 he was arrested and pleaded guilty to hacking, receiving a fine and avoiding prison on condition he did not reoffend. Assange went on to study mathematics and physics at Melbourne University.
Assange launched WikiLeaks in 2006, creating a web-based "dead letter drop" for would-be leakers.
Who are Julian Assange's wife and family?
Assange's wife, Stella Assange, said she is looking forward to a "new chapter" following his release from prison.
She revealed their relationship in a 2020 court statement supporting an application for bail.
In that statement, Stella Assange - then Stella Moris - said she met Assange in 2011 when she was a legal researcher and was asked to look into Swedish legal theory and practice.
“Over time Julian and I developed a strong intellectual and emotional bond. He became my best friend and I become his,” she wrote. The friendship developed, and despite the “extraordinary circ*mstances”, a close relationship began in 2015, she said.
They had two children together - in 2017 and 2019 - during his 2,487 days in self-imposed incarceration in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which began when he sought refuge to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex assault charges. That investigation was dropped in 2017.
The couple married at Belmarsh prison in March 2022.
What did he do?
Assange's Wikileaks website rose to prominence in April 2010 when it hosted a classified video showing a 2007 US helicopter attack that killed a dozen people in Baghdad during the Iraq war.
The site showed more than 90,000 classified US military documents on Afghanistan war, and about 400,000 classified US files on the Iraq war. The two leaks represented the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history.
Wikileaks followed this up with the release of 250,000 secret diplomatic cables from US embassies around the world, with some of the information published by newspapers such as The New York Times and The Guardian.
He was wanted by the US over an alleged conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information. Assange always denied wrongdoing and won support for his case from human rights organisations and journalist groups across the world.
How long was he in prison?
Assange had been in custody at Belmarsh prison for more than five years, but his lengthy legal battle in the UK over his extradition goes back longer.
It saw him enter and live in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, after requesting political asylum, in June 2012.
In April 2019, Ecuador withdrew his asylum, blaming “repeated violations” of “international conventions and daily-life protocols”. He was then detained in Belmarsh prison.
In a January 2021 ruling, then-district judge Vanessa Baraitser said Assange should not be sent to the US, citing a real and “oppressive” risk of suicide, while ruling against him on all other issues.
Later that year, US authorities won a High Court bid to overturn this block, paving the way towards Assange’s extradition.
Assange was due to bring his own challenge to the High Court in early July after he was recently given the go-ahead to challenge the original judge’s dismissal of parts of his case.
What is in the plea deal?
In exchange for pleading guilty to the single felony charge under the Espionage Act, with prosecutors agreeing to a sentence of five years.
However, Assange avoids US custody by receiving credit for time spent in a British prison.
The extradition request is now dropped and Assange will not face any other charges, meaning he is free to return to his home country of Australia.
What happens next?
Assange is set to touch down in the Australian capital Canberra on Wednesday morning.
He will eventually be reunited with his wife, two young sons and other members of the family.
Assange will pay half a million US dollars (£394,000) for the chartered flight on which he left Stansted, accompanied by a WikiLeaks lawyer, a representative of the Australian government and a medic to check on his health.
WikiLeaks has launched a fundraising campaign to pay for the flight which has so far raised more than £250,000.
Read more
Julian Assange’s children don’t know he’s been released, wife Stella reveals (Yahoo News UK)
The many twists and turns of Julian Assange’s lengthy legal fight (PA Media)
Unseen diplomatic manoeuvres helped unlock Assange deal (AFP)
