Julian Assange arrives in Australia after 12 years deprived of freedom

Julian Assange stepped onto Australian soil again as a free man on Wednesday just before 8 p.m. local time. With his right fist in the air, his shirt barely tucked into his pants and his tie flapping in the Australian winter wind, Assange greeted a crowd that applauded him and shouted “Welcome home!” before he embraced his wife and lawyer, Stella Assange, and his father, John Shipton, who have been advocating for years for his release. His return to Australia after 12 years of confinement in London, first at the Ecuadorean embassy and later at Belmarsh prison, and after pleading guilty to espionage in a U.S. court in the Northern Mariana Islands, ends a long-running citizens’ campaign that advocated for years for his release. It also fuels a political debate that has led the Labor government to greet the news with caution.

Assange, 52, will now be reunited with the two young children, aged seven and five, he had with his wife while living at the Ecuadorean embassy in London. “I hope his life will be a bit calmer and he will spend a year or so learning to walk on the beach again, to feel the sand on his feet, to play with his children patiently…,” his father told 9 News this morning, to which he expressed his wish that his offspring would have “an ordinary life” in the future.

The Australian government plans to welcome the WikiLeaks founder with a reception that still generates expectations for the sober tone with which the news of his release by the United Kingdom was received on Tuesday. Minutes after Assange landed in Canberra, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese celebrated his return at a press conference. “You probably already know this, but a moment ago Julian Assange was reunited with his family here in Australia,” the Labor leader said. “I have been clear as prime minister: whatever you may think about Mr. Assange and his activity, his continued imprisonment was purposeless.”

Assange, who was born in 1971 in Townsville, a town on the northeast coast of Australia, grew up in a dozen cities following his mother’s traveling theater company while becoming a teen hacker who was already putting the companies on the ropes. In 2010 he made the world talk about freedom of information after the revelation of millions of classified documents that revealed war crimes and put him in the crosshairs of the United States. His return to Australia concludes months of quiet government diplomacy and growing support in the streets and Congress for an Australian citizen not to be subject to the courts of another country.

Albanese, leader of a Labor government that came to power in mid-2022, changed almost a decade of official passivity on the Assange case by the conservative governments that preceded him. In February of this year, the Australian parliament passed a motion with 86 of the possible 151 votes in the House of Representatives to call on the United States and Great Britain to close the matter and allow Assange to return home.

Assange was released at noon this Wednesday after pleading guilty to espionage before a US court in Saipan, capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, which are an unincorporated territory of the United States in the Pacific Ocean, and after a judge considered his sentence served due to the five years he spent in a maximum security prison in London. “You will be able to leave this room a free man,” Judge Ramona Manglona told him after ratifying in a hearing the agreement between Assange’s defense team and the United States Department of Justice.

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