Julian Assange pleads guilty as part of an agreement with US justice.

Julian Assangereleased from a prison United Kingdompleaded guilty on Wednesday in a US court on a Pacific island as part of an agreement that will allow him to regain his freedom, AFP journalists observed.

Assange, sued by US authorities for having revealed hundreds of thousands of confidential documents, admitted responsibility for “conspiracy to obtain and disclose information relating to national defense.”

The founder of WikiLeaks, 52, arrived at the court in Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, dressed in a black suit and ocher tie. ”Guilty of the information,” Assange said in court. He then joked with the judge that his satisfaction with the deal “depends on the outcome of the hearing.”

Wikileaks announced on its website that Assange will travel to Canberra, the capital of Australia, on Wednesday after the hearing in Saipan.

– “Secret diplomacy” in the Assange case –

Assange could be sentenced to 62 months in prison, but having served a similar period of preventive detention in London, it is expected that he will be able to return free to Australia.

”He will be a free man once the agreement is ratified by the judge” on Wednesday, Stella Assange, his wife and mother of two of his children, explained to the BBC.

The pact involves her husband pleading guilty to a charge, which refers to “the obtaining and dissemination of information about national defense,” she said.

His mother, Christine Assange, said she was grateful that her son’s “ordeal” was coming to an end. “This shows the importance and power of secret diplomacy,” she said.

Former Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, one of Assange’s lawyers, celebrated that “he can finally be a free man after almost 14 years of struggle, deprived of liberty in the most adverse conditions.”

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights also welcomed his release and “the significant progress made towards a definitive resolution of this case,” which “raised a number of human rights concerns,” according to spokeswoman Elizabeth Throssell.

“He should not have been deprived of his freedom for even a day for having published information of public interest,” said Rebecca Vincent, campaign director of Reporters Without Borders. Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva celebrated “a democratic victory and the fight for press freedom.” “The world is a little better and less unjust today,” she added.

Stella Assange launched an appeal to raise financing to pay for the $520,000 that her husband has to return to the Australian government after chartering the flight between London and Australia.

– A 14-year saga of the Assange case –

This agreement, which ends a legal saga of almost 14 years, which includes seven years of confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, comes two weeks before a new key hearing before the British courts.

On July 9 and 10, Assange’s appeal against his extradition to the United States was expected to be examined. Since 2019, when he was detained in a high-security prison in London, Assange has been fighting to avoid being handed over to American justice, which is persecuting him for publish more than 700,000 confidential documents on military and diplomatic activities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan

The Australian, charged with 18 counts, faced up to 175 years in prison under the Espionage Act. The British government approved his extradition in June 2022. However, in May two judges granted him the right to appeal.

– Assange spent seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy –

The founder of WikiLeaks was arrested by British police in April 2019 after spending seven years locked up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, from where he sought to avoid extradition to Sweden in a rape investigation, which was dismissed that same year.

In recent years, calls had increased for US President Joe Biden to drop the charges against him.

Australia made a formal request in February, which the Democratic president said he was considering. “That the prime minister (Australian, Anthony Albanese) sometimes publicly said ‘enough is enough,’ and that Parliament backed him, was significant and absolutely contemplated by United States,” Emma Shortis, a researcher in international and security affairs at the think tank The Australia Institute, told AFP.

In the first official US reaction to the agreement, State Department spokesman Matthew Miller stated that as this is an ongoing legal matter it did not seem “appropriate to comment at this time.”