HAILED AS HERO
While the US government viewed Assange as reckless for putting its agents at risk of harm by publishing their names, his supporters hailed him as a hero for promoting free speech and exposing war crimes.
“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 US lawyer, Barry Pollack, told reporters outside the court.
He said WikiLeaks’ work would continue.
Assange’s British and Australian lawyer Jennifer Robinson thanked the Australian government for securing Assange’s release. His father, John Shipton, told Reuters he was relieved.
“That Julian can come home to Australia and see his family regularly and do the ordinary things of life is a treasure,” Shipton said in Canberra, where he was waiting for his son.
“The beauty of the ordinary is the essence of life.”
Assange had agreed to plead guilty to a single criminal count, according to filings in the US District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands.
The US territory in the western Pacific was chosen due to his opposition to travelling to the mainland US and for its proximity to Australia, prosecutors said.
Politicians in Australia who had campaigned for his release raised concern about the guilty plea on US soil, saying he was a journalist who had been convicted for doing his job.
“That is a really alarming precedent. It is the sort of thing we’d expect in an authoritarian or totalitarian country,” said Andrew Wilkie, an independent lawmaker who led a parliamentary group advocating for Assange.
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 extradition.
While stuck at the embassy he had two sons with Stella, who had been one of his lawyers. They married in 2022 at Belmarsh prison in London.
