Canberra, Australia:

Julian Assange’s father, John Shipton, could breathe a massive sigh of relief on Wednesday after a decade-long campaign to free his son.

The WikiLeaks founder on Wednesday was released by a court on the U.S. Pacific island territory of Saipan after pleading guilty to violating U.S. espionage law.

Assange’s family, including his father, children and wife, Stella, gathered in Australia’s capital Canberra ahead of his expected evening arrival by private jet, marking the end of a long legal fight tied to WikiLeaks’ release of hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. defence documents in 2010.

Shipton said he planned to ask his son in a low-key Australian way when he arrives: “Where have you been?”

“My faith has never, ever, ever died,” he told Reuters in an interview at parliament.

“That Julian can come home to Australia and see his family regularly and do the ordinary things of life is a treasure. Life measured amongst the beauty of the ordinary is the essence of life,” Shipton said.

He said he was “divided in two” on the deal that saw Assange plead guilty to one charge of espionage, saying his release meant he would have precious time with his sons.

He was nonetheless concerned about the “political and legal circumstances surrounding it”.

“I think it is going to be a problem for journalists and publishers anywhere in the world to publish criticism of the United States government,” he said.

Assange’s release was cause for celebration in Canberra, where politicians who had campaigned for Assange gathered around Shipton in a hall outside the parliament chamber.

“We want to give you a hug,” said lawmaker Sophie Scamps.

Assange will need time to recover from his “monastic life” in self-exile in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years, and then prison for five years, Shipton said.

He looked forward to being involved in his son’s “practical everyday human life, not the sweep of politics.”

“The American Secret Service in 2011 published their review saying we must hound him and his family to the end of the earth and bankrupt them. Its been expensive but I’ve got no complaints – the results are there for everyone to see,” he said.

He said the Australian government had been “nothing short of magnificent”.

Assange has previously said he got his “rebel gene” from his father. Shipton said he considers his son to be personally conservative and polite.

“It is his understanding of the capacity of the internet to bring to us information that can be the foundation of knowledge that is revolutionary,” he said.

“He is only 52 I imagine he will find something to do. He will be 53 next week. The momentum he has got … he will conjure forth those things that he can do.”

Shipton said the family had devoted the last decade to doing everything in its capacity to see Assange free.

“We Australians managed to turn around a superpower in its attempt to destroy an Australian citizen,” he said.

Shipton learned of the plea deal from his son Gabriel.

Gabriel told Reuters on Wednesday he was “feeling extremely relieved that this ordeal is finally over and that Julian can move on with his life.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange pleaded guilty to obtaining and publishing U.S. military secrets in a deal with Justice Department prosecutors that secured his liberty and concluded a drawn-out legal saga that raised divisive questions about press freedom and national security.

The criminal case of international intrigue, which had played out for years in major world stages of Washington and London, came to a surprise ending in a most unusual setting with Mr. Assange, 52, entering his plea on June 26 morning in federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. The American commonwealth in the Pacific is relatively close to Mr. Assange’s native Australia and accommodated his desire to avoid entering the continental United States.

Read | Julian Assange: A journalist or an enemy of the U.S. State?

The deal required the iconoclastic internet publisher to admit guilt to a single felony count but also permitted him to return to Australia without any time in an American prison. The judge sentenced him to the five years he’d already spent behind bars in the United Kingdom, fighting extradition to the United States on an Espionage Act indictment that could have carried a lengthy prison sentence in the event of a conviction. He was holed up for seven years before that in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.

He smiled slightly as U.S. District Judge Ramona Manglona imposed the sentence, pronouncing him a “free man.”

The conclusion enables both sides to claim a degree of satisfaction. The Justice Department, facing a defendant who had already served substantial jail time, was able to resolve — without trial — a case that raised thorny legal issues and that might never have reached a jury at all given the plodding pace of the extradition process. Mr. Assange, for his part, signalled begrudging contentment with the resolution, saying in court that though he believed the Espionage Act contradicted the First Amendment, he accepted the consequences of soliciting classified information from sources for publication.

Jennifer Robinson, one of Mr. Assange’s lawyers, told reporters after the hearing that the case “sets a dangerous precedent that should be a concern to journalists everywhere.”

“It’s a huge relief to Julian Assange, to his family, to his friends, to his supporters and to us — to everyone who believes in free speech around the world — that he can now return home to Australia and be reunited with his family,” she said.

Mr. Assange arrived at court in a dark suit, with a tie loosened around the collar, after flying from Britain on a charter plane accompanied by members of his legal team and Australian officials, including the top Australian diplomat in the U.K.

Inside the courthouse, he answered basic questions from Manglona, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, and appeared to listen intently as terms of the deal were discussed.

He appeared upbeat and relaxed during the hearing, at times cracking jokes with the judge. While signing his plea agreement, he made a joke about the 9-hour time difference between the U.K. and Saipan. At another point, when the judge asked him whether he was satisfied with the plea conditions, Assange responded: “It might depend on the outcome,” sparking some laughter in the courtroom.

“So far, so good,” the judge responded.

The plea deal, disclosed on June 24 night in a sparsely detailed Justice Department letter, represents the latest — and presumably final — chapter in a court fight involving the eccentric Australian computer expert who has been celebrated by supporters as a transparency crusader but lambasted by national security hawks who insist that his conduct put lives at risks and strayed far beyond the bounds of traditional journalism duties.

The criminal case brought by the Trump administration Justice Department centers on the receipt and publication of hundreds of thousands of war logs and diplomatic cables that included details of U.S. military wrongdoing in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Editorial | Free man: On the release of Julian Assange

Prosecutors alleged that he teamed with former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to obtain the records, including by conspiring to crack a Defense Department computer password, and published them without regard to American national security. Names of human sources who provided information to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan were among the details exposed, prosecutors have said.

But his activities drew an outpouring of support from press freedom advocates, who heralded his role in bringing to light military conduct that might otherwise have been concealed from view and warned of a chilling effect on journalists. Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack by American forces in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.

The indictment was unsealed in 2019, but Mr. Assange’s legal woes long predated the criminal case and continued well past it.

Weeks after the release of the largest document cache in 2010, a Swedish prosecutor issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Assange based on one woman’s allegation of rape and another’s allegation of molestation. Mr. Assange has long maintained his innocence, and the investigation was later dropped.

He presented himself in 2012 to the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he claimed asylum on the grounds of political persecution, and spent the following seven years in self-exile there, welcoming a parade of celebrity visitors and making periodic appearances from the building’s balcony to address supporters.

In 2019, his hosts revoked his asylum, allowing British police to arrest him. He remained locked up for the last five years while the Justice Department sought to extradite him, in a process that encountered scepticism from British judges who worried about how Mr. Assange would be treated by the U.S.

Ultimately, though, the resolution sparing Mr. Assange prison time in the U.S. contradicts years of ominous warnings by Mr. Assange and his supporters that the American criminal justice system would expose him to unduly harsh treatment, including potentially the death penalty— something prosecutors never sought.

Last month, Mr. Assange won the right to appeal an extradition order after his lawyers argued that the U.S. government provided “blatantly inadequate” assurances that he would have the same free speech protections as an American citizen if extradited from Britain.

His wife, Stella Assange, told the BBC from Australia that it had been “touch and go” over 72 hours whether the deal would go ahead but she felt “elated” at the news.

“He will be a free man once it is signed off by a judge,” she said, adding that she still didn’t think it was real.

Mr. Assange on June 24 left the London prison where he has spent the last five years after being granted bail during a secret hearing last week. He boarded a plane that landed hours later in Bangkok to refuel before taking off again toward Saipan. A video posted by WikiLeaks on X, showed Mr. Assange staring intently out the window at the blue sky as the plane headed toward the island.

“Imagine. From over 5 years in a small cell in a maximum security prison. Nearly 14 years detained in the U.K. To this,” WikiLeaks wrote.