By Sally Sara: After five years of imprisonment, Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, has today walked free from prison and boarded a flight out of the UK. The 52-year-old struck a deal with US prosecutors agreeing to plead guilty to violating US espionage laws as a result of Wikileaks publishing a trove of classified documents. In exchange for the plea, the Wikileaks founder is expected to be released by American authorities and allowed to return home to Australia. Here’s our North America correspondent, Carrington Clarke.
Carrington Clarke: The information we have mostly comes courtesy of the documents that have been filed in the Northern Mariana Islands, which is a United States territory in the Pacific Ocean, basically due north from Julian Assange’s hometown of Townsville. And the fact that it is in Saipan is important. We’ve known that Julian Assange has repeatedly said that he was very concerned for his safety, in particular, he was worried about getting the death penalty if he ever was brought to the United States proper. So it seems that this is a compromise situation where he will be able to plead guilty in a US court effectively, but outside the United States proper. And also, Saipan is much closer to Australia, which makes it easier to get home. So he’s agreeing to plead guilty to a single criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified US national defence documents. So the agreement means that he will be sentenced to 62 months in prison, but that is the length of time he’s already served in the British prison system, which has been where he’s been held for all these years as he spent fighting the extradition to the United States. And that single count that he’s pleading guilty to is in regards to the classified documents that he received or WikiLeaks received from the period of 2009 to 2011. Remembering WikiLeaks came to global attention when it released those hundreds of thousands of secret documents, many of which related to the United States military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Importantly, WikiLeaks was also a player in the United States 2016 presidential election. It released a huge trove of documents from the Democratic Party. This guilty plea has nothing to do with those, but it’s one of the reasons he’s such an infamous figure here in the United States.
Sally Sara: And Carrington, what happens from here? What do we know?
Carrington Clarke: So WikiLeaks has released footage of Julian Assange, which they say is him leaving the United Kingdom. People around the world now are tracking what they believe is the flight that looks like it’s going via Bangkok to refuel on its way to these Northern Mariana Islands, which is where he will plead guilty. Importantly, the time zone is the same as Australian Standard Time. So it’ll be 9am on Wednesday where we’re expecting Julian Assange will enter this guilty plea and then he should be making his way to Australia again. These things can fall over or something could go wrong. But at this point, we believe he would then start the movements to Australia where he will be reunited with his family, including his two children who have only known their father to be imprisoned. I mean, this saga, yes, he’s been in prison in the UK for 62 months, but this has gone on really since 2010. Remembering he spent seven years in the embassy of Ecuador in the UK at that point when he was fighting allegations of rape in Sweden. But he always said that his biggest concern was that the US would try to force his extradition to the United States. But this is a significant moment and it does appear that this protracted legal battle, one of really the most intriguing we’ve probably seen in decades, does appear to be coming to an end. And now the great debate will continue about exactly who is Julian Assange. Is he this defender of the right to know or is he somebody who imperiled the lives of so many people who are working with the US military system? And that debate, I’m sure, will be contentious and long lasting.
Sally Sara: That’s our North America correspondent, Carrington Clarke, there.
