Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has made a deal with the US government and is on his way to freedom

London. The legal saga surrounding Wikileaks founder Julian Assange appears to be coming to an end. As various American media and agencies consistently report, the Australian whistleblower, who, among other things, published material exposing American war crimes, has made a deal with the US government. This is apparently evident from American court documents. Accordingly, Assange will plead guilty to one count on his long list of charges and ultimately be released.

This is listed as a “conspiracy to obtain and disclose confidential U.S. defense documents.” This should carry a fine of 62 months. Assange has already served the latter; he has spent the last five years in a British prison.

Apparently Assange doesn’t want to set foot on the US mainland or Hawaii. Therefore, he would have to appear in court in the American territory of the Northern Mariana Islands – which is less than 5,000 kilometers north of his home country Australia in the middle of the Pacific Ocean – to plead guilty. The 52-year-old could end a year-long battle and possibly return to Australia this week. Flights between the capital Saipan and Sydney via Tokyo or Seoul take approximately 20 hours.

Assange has left London

According to a Wikileaks social media post, Assange has already boarded a plane in London and is on his way “to freedom.” Video footage shows a gray-haired Assange full of energy boarding a plane, wearing jeans and a shirt. “On the morning of June 24, he left Belmarsh maximum security prison after spending 1,901 days there,” the report said. on platform X. The High Court in London granted him bail and he boarded a plane and left Britain.

“This is the result of a global campaign,” Wikileaks officials wrote. Press freedom activists, lawmakers and politicians from across the political spectrum, including the United Nations, participated. “After more than five years in a 2×3 meter cell in which he was isolated 23 hours a day, he will soon be reunited with his wife Stella Assange and his children, who only know their father from prison.”

Explosive revelations

The Australian used Wikileaks, an online disclosure platform he founded in 2006, to publish thousands of documents that companies and governments had declared secret and that showed war crimes, espionage and corruption. The purpose of the platform was to expose injustices and illegal actions that should have remained hidden under the cover of state security. Particularly explosive were the thousands of secret documents about American activities in Iraq and Afghanistan that then intelligence officer Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning leaked to him and which he published in 2010. Manning went to prison for this, but a large part of the former soldier’s sentence was waived by former American president Barack Obama. Among the material released was a US military video showing dozens of innocent people being killed in Iraq, including two employees of the Reuters news agency.

The US had a long list of charges against Assange, accusing him of violating US espionage laws and endangering national security. If extradited to the US, he could have faced up to 175 years in prison. Fearing these consequences, Assange spent seven years in voluntary exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. In 2019 he was arrested and transferred to Belmarsh Prison in London. During his captivity, the Australian’s health deteriorated sharply, in 2021 he even suffered a small stroke and he was also unable to attend the last court hearings for health reasons. “As his wife, I fear he will be buried in the deepest, darkest corner of the American prison system until his death,” his wife Stella Assange once wrote in an article for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ABC.

First breakthrough in May

A first major breakthrough occurred in May when the Supreme Court of Great Britain decided that Assange could lodge a new appeal against his extradition to the US. Immediately after the ruling in Britain, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese reiterated his call for an end to the prosecution of the Wikileaks founder. Albanese said to reportersthat his “continued captivity” was pointless. “Enough is enough.” The human rights group Amnesty International also said it would “call on the US to finally put an end to this shameful saga by dropping all charges against Assange.”

In March it became clear that Washington also had an interest in ending the saga. This is what was reported by “Wall Street Journal” at the time that the US Department of Justice was looking for ways to end Assange’s legal marathon. A deal like the one now apparently being negotiated would have been discussed at the time.

Case “played into the hands of the Chinese”

According to Greg Barns, an Australian lawyer and Assange supporter, the case was so explosive because it was never a “normal extradition case,” as he once told the local Australian edition of ‘The guardsaid. The Assange case has given countries like China the opportunity to use it “as a kind of moral equivalence argument.” According to Barns, the case played right into the hands of the Chinese, especially because “the US is keen on democratic norms and human rights norms over the preach to the whole world.”

However, it was not necessarily certain that Assange would accept a deal. Only had it in March Donald Rothwell, a professor of international law at the Australian National University who has followed the Assange case for years, said he was “surprised” that a deal could be reached at all, as Assange had never pleaded guilty in the past. “It would actually be outside of Assange’s character and his principles to make such an admission,” he said at the time.