Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and his wife Stella will seek a pardon after he agreed to plead guilty to violating US espionage law, bringing his long-running legal saga in Britain to an end.
Julian Assange is expected before a court in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory in the Pacific, where he is due to face a judge as part of a plea deal that could see him freed to return to Australia.
Stella Assange, a lawyer who has worked on his campaign almost since the start of his legal battles, said she was elated at the move but still angry that the had been held for so long.
She said they would seek a pardon because the acceptance of guilt on an espionage charge was a "very serious concern" for journalists around the world.
A still taken from a video released by Wikileaks shows, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange (L) before boarding a plane at Stansted airport, London, Britain, 24 June 2024. AP Credit: WIKILEAKS/HANDOUT/EPA
"It's Australian policy that he will have to pay his own return flight so he's had to charter a flight and so he will basically be in debt when he lands in Canberra," Assange said.
A plane carrying the WikiLeaks founder landed in Bangkok on Tuesday afternoon to refuel before flying the WikiLeaks founder to a court hearing in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands.
Assange, whose extradition was long sought by the United States, and disseminate national defence information, according to court documents.
A charter flight flew Assange from London, and Agence France-Presse journalists saw it touch down at Bangkok's Don Mueang airport at around 12:30pm local time (3:30pm AEST).
A senior Thai official told Agence France-Presse that Assange's name was on the passenger list.
"(The plane) is expected to refuel and resupply with water before departing at 9pm for Saipan island," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
'Julian Assange is free', WikiLeaks declares
A video posted by WikiLeaks showed Assange sitting in an unknown location with a piece of paper in his hand, shortly before boarding a plane.
"Julian Assange is free," the publisher said in a statement on the social media platform X.
"He left Belmarsh maximum security prison on the morning of 24 June, after having spent 1901 days there.
"He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted airport during the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and departed the UK."
WikiLeaks in its statement added that a global campaign had led to negotiations with the US Department of Justice, "leading to a deal that has not yet been formally finalised".
at 9am on Wednesday. He will likely be credited for the time he has already served and face no new jail time.
According to the Associated Press, the hearing is taking place there because of Assange's opposition to travelling to the continental US, and the court's proximity to Australia.
'We want him home': Australian PM
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the legal proceedings were "crucial and delicate" and it was "not appropriate" to provide further detailed comment.
"Regardless of the views that people have about Mr Assange's activities, the case has dragged on for too long," he told parliament.
"There is nothing to be gained from his continued incarceration and we want him brought home to Australia."
Albanese said Australia's High Commissioner to the UK, Stephen Smith, is travelling with Assange and Australia's US Ambassador Kevin Rudd is also providing "important assistance".
Assange's wife Stella Assange thanked supporters in a statement online.
"Words cannot express our immense gratitude to YOU - yes YOU, who have all mobilised for years and years to make this come true," she said on X.
Assange case 'cast shadow' over press freedom
Many press freedom advocates have argued that criminally charging Assange threatens free speech.
Jodie Ginsberg, the chief executive of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said the case has "cast a very long shadow" over press freedom globally.
"Julian has effectively had to plead guilty to an activity that's the kind of activity that journalists globally perform — day in, day out, in the public interest — and obviously that is problematic," she told SBS News.
"So it really has exposed that use and abuse of national security-type laws to silence journalists who would seek to expose crimes committed by governments, by those in power."
Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce, who has been among a group of Australian politicians advocating for Assange's release, said journalists all had cause to be concerned about the prosecution.
"If the dissemination of this information is a crime, then every person where I now stand, in the Parliament of Australia's fourth estate, is on their way to the United States of America, because you all printed it. And that creates massive confusion," he said.
"I don't want a place in Australia where if I offend the Quran, I'm off to Riyadh, if I offend the Chinese Communist Party, I'm off to Beijing, or an Australian citizen who offends a law in the United States is off to the United States — unless he's in the United States when he commits it, and in that case, that's a completely different issue."
A screenshot of a video posted by WikiLeaks of Julian Assange boarding a plane at what the publisher said was Stansted airport in London. Source: Supplied / WikiLeaks/X
Who is Julian Assange?
In 2010, WikiLeaks released hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — the largest security breaches of their kind in US military history — along with swaths of diplomatic cables.
Assange was indicted during former US president Donald Trump's administration, over WikiLeaks' mass release of secret US documents, which were leaked by Chelsea Manning, a former US military intelligence analyst who was also prosecuted under the Espionage Act.
The trove of more than 700,000 documents included diplomatic cables and battlefield accounts such as a 2007 video of a US Apache helicopter firing at suspected insurgents in Iraq, killing a dozen people including two Reuters news staff. That video was released in 2010.
The charges against Assange sparked outrage among his many global supporters, who have long argued that Assange, as the publisher of WikiLeaks, should not face charges typically used against federal government employees who steal or leak information.
Assange was first arrested in Britain in 2010 on a European arrest warrant after Swedish authorities said they wanted to question him over sex-crime allegations that were later dropped. He fled to Ecuador's embassy, where he remained for seven years, to avoid extradition to Sweden.
He was dragged out of the embassy in 2019 and jailed for skipping bail. He has been in London's Belmarsh top security jail ever since, from where he has for almost five years been fighting extradition to the United States.
