Julian Assange

Julian Assange was born on July 3, 1971, in Townsville, Queensland, Australia. A timeline compiled by ReutersReutersReuters is an international news agency founded in London in 1851 by Paul Julius Reuter and is now the news business of Thomson Reuters. It provides text, photo, video, and graphics coverage to media and institutional clients and distributes it through channels such as Reuters Connect.Open the full entry says that his parents were involved in theatre.⁠[1][2][3]

His mother is Christine Hawkins and his biological father is John Shipton. A long 2024 article in the Evening Standard states that he was born Julian Hawkins, that his mother was a visual artist and his father an anti-war activist and builder, that his parents separated about a year after his birth, and that he did not see his father again until he was 25.⁠[4][2]

He took his surname from his stepfather, Brett Assange. The Evening Standard article states that his mother married Brett, a travelling actor and theatre producer, when he was one, and that he regards Brett as his father.⁠[4][2]

The article says that the family settled for a time on Magnetic Island until their house burned down; that when he was about four, his mother and a male friend came upon material about British nuclear tests at Maralinga, after which the friend was beaten by police and his mother was warned that she risked being charged as “an unfit mother”; and that when he was about eight, his mother and Brett Assange divorced.⁠[4]

It says that his mother had another son in a later relationship, which ended in 1982 and led to a bitter custody battle over his half-brother. In Assange’s account, his mother’s partner at the time was a member of an Australian cult called “The Family,” and they kept being tracked down; for the next six years he and his mother lived as fugitives under assumed names. The article adds that he lived in more than 30 Australian towns and cities and had moved 37 times by the age of 14.⁠[4]

His family moved often, and he was homeschooled and took correspondence courses. The Evening Standard article says that he was taught by teachers his mother met on her travels; Store norske leksikon calls him largely self-taught.⁠[1][2][4]

By the age of 16, in 1987, he was hacking under the name “Mendax” and had co-founded “International Subversives” with two others. In the late 1980s the group broke into systems in Europe and the United States, including networks linked to the PentagonU.S. Department of DefenseThe U.S. Department of Defense is an executive department of the United States federal government, formed in 1949 from the National Military Establishment created in 1947 and headquartered at the Pentagon. The department’s website describes it as America’s oldest and largest government agency.Open the full entry and NASANASAThe National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is the U.S. federal agency responsible for the civilian space program, aeronautics research and space science. Established by law in 1958 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., it has run programs including Mercury, the Apollo Moon landings, the Space Shuttle, the International Space Station and Artemis.Open the full entry; as “Mendax,” he himself got into systems of institutions including NASA and the Pentagon.⁠[4][2][1]

Police raided his mother’s home and seized his equipment; Assange said the case involved an allegation that $500,000 had been stolen from Citibank. The Evening Standard article states that in 1991 he was arrested on 31 counts of computer-related crime, pleaded guilty to 25 of them and paid only a small amount in compensation.⁠[4]

Accounts of the outcome differ slightly. Encyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia BritannicaEncyclopædia Britannica is a general English-language encyclopedia first published in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1768; the name also refers to its publisher, Chicago-based Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (which presents itself as The Britannica Group). The print edition ended in 2012, and the company’s main businesses since then have been the online encyclopedia Britannica.com, digital education products for schools and libraries, and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.Open the full entry states that Australian authorities charged him in 1991 with 31 counts of cybercrime, that he pleaded guilty to most of them and received a small fine, and that the judge attributed his conduct to youthful curiosity; Store norske leksikon says that he was convicted in 1996 but not sent to prison, partly because the intrusions were not regarded as malicious and partly because of his difficult upbringing; the Reuters and Al JazeeraAl JazeeraAl Jazeera is a news media network headquartered in Doha, Qatar, founded by Sheikh Hamad ibn Khalifa Al Thani, emir of Qatar.Open the full entry timelines put it in 1995, when he was fined for hacking and avoided prison on condition that he did not reoffend.⁠[1][2][3][5]

He later described the year that followed as the “worst of [his] life”; the Evening Standard article says that during it he slept rough along Merri Creek and in Sherbrooke Forest.⁠[4]

In 1997 he co-wrote the book Underground with Suelette Dreyfus, which sets out the “golden rules” of hacker culture. In the book he described his stepfather, Brett Assange, as a good man.⁠[2][4]

In 2006 he registered the WikiLeaks.org domain and founded WikiLeaks. He called his approach “scientific journalism,” publishing primary source material with little editorial commentary. WikiLeaks’ first publication, in December 2006, was a message from a Somali rebel leader encouraging the use of hired gunmen to assassinate government officials; later scoops included details of the U.S. military’s detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, a secret membership roster of the British National Party, internal documents of the Scientology movement and private emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. WikiLeaks served as an internet-based “dead letter drop” for leakers of classified or sensitive information.⁠[2][1][3]

The Evening Standard article says that in the same year he set up a profile on the dating site OkCupid under the name “Harry Harrison.”⁠[4]

In 2009, WikiLeaks received an award for New Media from Amnesty International.⁠[6]

The U.S. Justice Department’s 2019 indictment alleges that from late 2009 Assange and WikiLeaks solicited classified material, including through a “Most Wanted Leaks” list; the second superseding indictment of 2020 further alleges that at a hacking conference in 2009 he said that WikiLeaks had obtained nonpublic Congressional Research Service reports by exploiting a vulnerability in Congress’s document distribution system.⁠[7][8]

On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks released a video titled “Collateral Murder,” showing a U.S. helicopter air strike in Baghdad. The attack killed 11 civilians, among them two Reuters staff members; two of the dead were journalists.⁠[3][5][2]

On July 25, 2010, WikiLeaks released more than 91,000 documents, most of them secret U.S. military reports on the war in Afghanistan. In 2010 WikiLeaks published nearly half a million documents from Bradley (later Chelsea) Manning.⁠[3][1]

In August 2010 Swedish prosecutors issued an arrest warrant over one rape allegation and one molestation allegation, then withdrew it shortly afterwards, on the grounds that the evidence for the rape allegation was insufficient. In September Sweden reopened the rape investigation, and Assange left for Britain. The Swedish Prosecution Authority’s 2019 release states that in 2010, while suspected of sexual offences in Sweden, he fled to the United Kingdom, and that the suspected rape was committed in August 2010.⁠[5][9]

The first warrant was dismissed in August 2010 for lack of evidence. Assange denied the allegations and said they were a pretext for extraditing him to the United States.⁠[1][10]

In October 2010, WikiLeaks released 400,000 classified military files on the Iraq war.⁠[3][5]

On November 18, 2010, a Swedish court ordered Assange’s arrest on sex-crime allegations: the Stockholm District Court made a detention order in his absence, which the Svea Court of Appeal upheld, and a Swedish prosecutor issued a European Arrest Warrant on December 2, 2010.⁠[3][11]

On November 28, 2010, WikiLeaks began publishing more than 250,000 State Department cables, the daily message traffic between the department and more than 270 U.S. diplomatic outposts; The New York TimesThe New York TimesThe New York Times is an American morning daily newspaper published in New York City. Founded in 1851, it is published by The New York Times Company.Open the full entry, France’s Le Monde, Britain’s Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel were among the outlets that received copies in advance and published extracts. The White House condemned the release, saying that “such disclosures put at risk our diplomats, intelligence professionals”; the State Department’s legal adviser, Harold Koh, had warned Assange the night before that lives and military operations could be endangered, and rejected his request for help in removing sensitive details.⁠[12]

Assange said at the time that the cables showed “the U.S. spying on its allies and the U.N.” and that the release “reveals the contradictions between the U.S.’s public persona and what it says behind closed doors,” describing it as the first of a series of releases planned for the coming months. WikiLeaks said its site was under cyberattack that day. Governments condemned the releases, and some U.S. politicians called for him to be pursued as a terrorist.⁠[12][1]

In December 2010, Assange was arrested in Britain on a European Arrest Warrant. He surrendered to London police and was held pending an extradition hearing; the High Court then granted him bail.⁠[3][5][1]

In 2011 the Sydney Peace Foundation awarded him its Gold Medal for peace with justice, with the citation “For exceptional courage and initiative in pursuit of human rights”; the medal was presented by the veteran Australian broadcaster Mary Kostakidis. The foundation states that the ceremony took place in mid-2011 and was filmed at London’s Frontline Club; Encyclopædia Britannica dates the award to May 2011. The foundation’s director, Stuart Rees, compared his work with that of Tom Paine and Daniel EllsbergDaniel EllsbergDaniel Ellsberg (1931–2023) was an American military analyst and economist who worked at the RAND Corporation and took part in the Defense Department’s top-secret history of decision-making in Vietnam. In 1971 he gave the study, later known as the Pentagon Papers, to the press; the charges brought against him were dismissed in 1973, and he spent the following decades as a peace and anti-nuclear activist.Open the full entry. Accepting the medal, he said: “The real value of this award, and the Sydney Peace Foundation is that it makes explicit the link between peace and justice.” In the same year he received the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.⁠[13][1][2]

In February 2011, a London court ordered his extradition to Sweden, and he appealed. His argument that a Swedish prosecutor, as a party to criminal proceedings, could not be a “judicial authority” failed at the extradition hearing and on appeal to the Divisional Court.⁠[3][11]

In September 2011, Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography was published; it appeared against his wishes, after he had withdrawn his support for the project. Store norske leksikon lists the book as by Assange and Andrew O’Hagan.⁠[1][2]

On September 2, 2011, WikiLeaks published its full cache of 251,287 unredacted U.S. embassy cables in searchable form. The decision followed an online poll of its Twitter followers and came after a book published in February by a Guardian journalist disclosed the passphrase to the raw archive, which then spread across file-sharing networks. WikiLeaks said: “Given that the full database file is downloadable from hundreds of sites there is only one internally rational action.”⁠[14]

The Guardian strongly condemned the release, saying the unredacted documents identified activists and U.S. intelligence agents and put them at risk of arrest or retribution; the paper said it had understood that the passphrase gave only temporary access to an encrypted copy. WikiLeaks replied: “It is false that the passphrase was temporary or was ever described as such,” and threatened legal action against the Guardian for negligence.⁠[14]

In November 2011, WikiLeaks received the top honour of the Walkley Awards, Australia’s most prestigious journalism awards, for “Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism.” The judges praised WikiLeaks’ “courageous and controversial commitment to the finest traditions of journalism: justice through transparency.”⁠[6]

In April 2012 The World Tomorrow, a talk show he hosted, debuted online and on RT, the state-funded Russian satellite news network. He recorded the interviews in an improvised studio while under house arrest in rural Norfolk, England; the first guest was the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.⁠[1]

On May 30, 2012, the UK Supreme Court dismissed his appeal in Assange v The Swedish Prosecution Authority by a 5–2 majority, holding that a European Arrest Warrant issued by a Swedish prosecutor was a valid warrant under the Extradition Act 2003. The majority comprised Lord Phillips, Lord Walker, Lord Brown, Lord Kerr and Lord Dyson; Lady Hale and Lord Mance dissented. The majority held that the UK statute should be read consistently with the EU Framework Decision, which required a uniform meaning of “judicial authority” not limited to judges; the dissenters considered that Parliament had intended the issuing authority to be a court, judge or magistrate.⁠[11][15]

The Reuters timeline dates the Supreme Court’s rejection of his final appeal to June 14, 2012.⁠[3]

On June 19, 2012, he took refuge in Ecuador’s embassy in London and sought asylum. He did so to avoid extradition to Sweden, fearing later extradition to the United States. He argued that a trial there would be politically motivated and could expose him to the death penalty.⁠[3][1]

In August 2012 Ecuador granted him political asylum, but he remained confined to the embassy. A later opinion of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention records the British position: the United Kingdom is not a party to the 1954 Convention on Diplomatic Asylum, does not recognize diplomatic asylum, and regarded him as having entered the embassy of his own free will and as free to leave at any point.⁠[3][1][16]

On December 3, 2012, Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet, by Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann, was released. The book was published by OR Books; its main text is a multi-part conversation among the four, and it opens with Assange’s manifesto “A Call to Cryptographic Arms,” which warns of a “postmodern surveillance dystopia” and urges resistance through encryption, policy pressure and free software.⁠[17][18]

In 2013 he stood for the Australian Senate as a candidate of the WikiLeaks Party, which was founded in July 2013; in the general election of September 7, the party won less than 1 percent of the national vote and no Senate seats. In the count as of September 7, the party had about 0.62 percent of the national vote and just over 25,000 votes, or 1.18 percent, in Victoria, far short of the one-sixth of a state’s vote needed for a seat, and The Register concluded that day that his campaign had almost certainly failed. He had hoped that election to the Senate would make it easier for him to leave the Ecuadorian embassy and come home.⁠[19][1]

In July 2014 he lost a bid to have the Swedish warrant cancelled; a Stockholm judge upheld it over alleged sexual offences against two women.⁠[5]

In August 2015, Swedish prosecutors dropped three of the four allegations because the statute of limitations had expired, while the rape investigation remained open.⁠[5][1][2]

In October 2015 the Metropolitan Police ended their 24-hour guard outside the embassy but said that he would be arrested if he left; the three-year operation was estimated to have cost millions.⁠[5]

On December 4, 2015, the UN Human Rights Council’s Working Group on Arbitrary Detention adopted, at its 74th session, Opinion No. 54/2015 (issued April 6, 2016), finding that “the deprivation of liberty of Julian Assange is arbitrary,” in breach of provisions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; it asked Sweden and the United Kingdom to assess his situation, ensure his safety and physical integrity and facilitate his freedom of movement expediently, and considered the adequate remedy to be securing his free movement and an enforceable right to compensation.⁠[16]

Working Group member Vladimir Tochilovsky dissented in an annexed individual opinion, arguing that Assange’s stay in the embassy was self-confinement to evade arrest rather than detention. In its response Sweden stated that it had received no request to extradite him to a third state, that he stayed in the embassy voluntarily without any causal link to the European Arrest Warrant, and that the offences he was suspected of — rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion — were non-political crimes.⁠[16]

During the 2016 U.S. election, WikiLeaks published communications of the Democratic National Committee and of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The release of the committee’s emails forced several people, including the committee’s chair, out of the party organization. In the assessment of Encyclopædia Britannica, Assange made no secret of his personal hostility toward Clinton, and the leaks were clearly timed to do maximum damage to her campaign. Numerous independent cybersecurity experts and U.S. law enforcement agencies confirmed that the data had been obtained by hackers associated with Russian intelligence agencies; Assange denied that the information had come from Russia.⁠[1][2]

In April 2017, CIACentral Intelligence AgencyThe Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is an independent U.S. intelligence agency established under the National Security Act of 1947 to provide national security intelligence to senior U.S. policymakers. It is headquartered in Langley, Virginia.Open the full entry Director Mike Pompeo called WikiLeaks “a non-state hostile intelligence service often abetted by state actors like Russia.”⁠[5]

On May 19, 2017, Director of Public Prosecution Marianne Ny discontinued the investigation into Assange’s suspected rape (lesser degree) (Stockholm District Court case B 12885-10), on the grounds that he had stayed at the Ecuadorian embassy for almost five years, evading the efforts of Swedish and British authorities to carry out the surrender decision under the European Arrest Warrant, so that surrender could not be expected in the foreseeable future. The authority stated that continuing would require formally notifying him of the suspicions, which Ecuador was not expected to assist with, so all options were exhausted; the prosecutor revoked the detention order in absentia, withdrew the European Arrest Warrant, and said the investigation could be resumed immediately if he made himself available.⁠[20][3]

In December 2017, Ecuador accepted his application for citizenship; on January 11, 2018, Foreign Minister María Fernanda Espinosa announced it, saying: “What naturalization does is provide the asylum seeker another layer of protection.” Ecuador also sought to make him a member of its diplomatic staff, which would have brought protections under the Vienna Convention; the British Foreign Office refused, stating: “Ecuador knows that the way to resolve this issue is for Julian Assange to leave the embassy to face justice.”⁠[21]

On December 21, 2017, a federal magistrate judge in VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry issued a criminal complaint charging him with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion; on the same day Ecuador granted him diplomatic status.⁠[22]

On March 6, 2018, a U.S. federal grand jury returned an indictment against him for conspiracy to commit computer intrusion; the indictment was brought in the Eastern District of Virginia.⁠[22][23]

On April 11, 2019, Ecuador withdrew his asylum on the grounds of his repeated violations of international law and of the terms it had imposed on him, and British police, at Ecuador’s invitation, arrested him inside the embassy and carried him out. The United States had by then issued an extradition warrant for computer crimes, and he was also wanted in Britain for failing to appear in court.⁠[1][3][2]

The same day, the U.S. Justice Department unsealed a charge against him of one count of conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, carrying a maximum of five years in prison. The indictment alleges that in March 2010 he conspired with Chelsea Manning, then a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, to help crack a password on Defense Department computers connected to SIPRNet, the classified network, so that Manning could log on under another username and make the source of the disclosures harder to trace; it quotes a chat in which Manning wrote “after this upload, that’s all I really have got left” and Assange replied “curious eyes never run dry in my experience.” The release states that Assange is presumed innocent until proven guilty.⁠[24]

On May 1, 2019, a British court sentenced him to 50 weeks in prison for skipping bail. He completed the sentence early but stayed in custody pending extradition hearings, held at Belmarsh prison.⁠[3][2]

After he left the embassy, the investigation was reopened at the request of the injured party’s counsel and resumed on May 13, 2019, with prosecutors saying they would seek his extradition; investigators then carried out several measures, mostly witness interviews.⁠[9][3]

On May 23, 2019, a U.S. federal grand jury returned an 18-count superseding indictment against him, with charges including conspiracy, obtaining and receiving classified information, aiding in the communication of classified documents and conspiracy to commit computer intrusion; each count carried a maximum of ten years except the computer-intrusion conspiracy, which carried five. The indictment alleges that he conspired with Chelsea Manning to obtain and disclose classified documents, with Manning providing about 90,000 Afghanistan war activity reports, 400,000 Iraq war activity reports, 800 Guantánamo Bay detainee assessment briefs and 250,000 State Department cables, and that the classified documents he published left unredacted the names of human sources, including Afghans, Iraqis, journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates and political dissidents, putting them at risk of serious harm.⁠[7]

The charges comprised 17 espionage counts and one computer misuse count, carrying a combined maximum of 175 years; his lawyers argued that he acted as a journalist protected by the First Amendment.⁠[25]

On June 6, 2019, the United States submitted its extradition request to Britain through diplomatic channels on the basis of the superseding indictment; the Reuters timeline dates the Justice Department’s formal request to June 11.⁠[22][3]

On November 19, 2019, Deputy Director of Public Prosecution Eva-Marie Persson announced the discontinuation of the investigation into Assange’s suspected rape in August 2010 (Uppsala District Court case B 3167-19), on the grounds that so much time had passed that the evidence had weakened considerably. She said: “I would like to emphasise that the injured party has submitted a credible and reliable version of events,” but that “the evidential situation has been weakened to such an extent” that “there is no longer any reason to continue the investigation.”⁠[9]

The extradition hearing, presided over by District Judge Vanessa Baraitser, took place in two parts, from February 24 to 27 and from September 7 to October 1, 2020; the Reuters timeline dates the start of the first part to February 21, 2020. The February hearing adjourned after a week, and its continuation was delayed from May to September because of COVID-19.⁠[22][3][5]

On June 24, 2020, a U.S. federal grand jury returned a second superseding indictment that added no counts but broadened the alleged hacking conspiracy: it alleges that Assange and others at WikiLeaks recruited hackers and agreed with them to commit computer intrusions; that in 2010 he gained unauthorized access to a government computer system of a NATONATONATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, is an alliance founded on the North Atlantic Treaty signed in 1949, with collective defence as its core principle. Its political and administrative centre is in Brussels, Belgium.Open the full entry country; and that in 2012 he communicated with a LulzSec leader who was then cooperating with the FBIFederal Bureau of InvestigationThe Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the federal investigative agency of the U.S. Department of Justice. It grew out of a force of special agents organized by Attorney General Charles J. Bonaparte in 1908, has used its present name since 1935 and is headquartered in Washington, D.C.Open the full entry and provided a list of targets. The release states that Assange is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.⁠[8]

On July 29, 2020, the Home Secretary certified the U.S. extradition request as valid under section 70(8) of the Extradition Act 2003, and he was arrested on it.⁠[22]

On January 4, 2021, District Judge Vanessa Baraitser of Westminster Magistrates’ Court ruled under section 91 of the Extradition Act 2003 that, by reason of his mental condition and the harsh conditions of detention he was likely to face, it would be oppressive to extradite him, and discharged him; she decided every other issue in favour of the United States and referred to the possibility that special administrative measures would be imposed on him. She refused him bail on the ground that he was a flight risk.⁠[26][22][5]

In July 2021, the High Court gave the United States permission to appeal the ruling that had blocked extradition. On July 26, Ecuador’s Pichincha Court for Contentious Administrative Matters, acting on a claim by the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry, declared his naturalization void because of problems in his file including inconsistent signatures, possible alteration of documents and unpaid fees; his lawyer, Carlos Poveda, said the decision was made without due process, that “Assange was not allowed to appear in the case,” and that he would appeal.⁠[5][25]

On December 10, 2021, the United States won its appeal. After the United States gave assurances, including that he would not be subjected to special administrative measures and that he could serve any sentence in Australia, the Divisional Court of Lord Burnett CJ and Holroyde LJ allowed the appeal and remitted the case with a direction to send it to the Home Secretary.⁠[3][22][26]

On March 14, 2022, Britain’s Supreme Court refused him permission to appeal against the extradition decision.⁠[3][5]

On March 23, 2022, he married his long-term partner, Stella Moris, inside a British high-security prison, Belmarsh.⁠[3][4]

On June 17, 2022, the Home Secretary ordered his extradition to the United States. On June 30 he filed a notice of appeal under sections 103 and 108 of the Extradition Act 2003.⁠[22][3]

In May 2023, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said that Assange should be released. On June 6, Mr Justice Swift refused him permission to adduce further evidence and refused leave to appeal on the papers. In the same year he received the Ossietzky Prize for promoting freedom of expression.⁠[5][22][2]

On February 20–21, 2024, his renewed application for leave to appeal was heard by a Divisional Court of Dame Victoria Sharp, President of the King’s Bench Division, and Mr Justice Johnson; his supporters described it as his final attempt to prevent extradition.⁠[22][3]

On March 26, 2024, in its judgment [2024] EWHC 700 (Admin), the Divisional Court refused leave on six of his nine grounds and conditionally granted it on the other three (freedom of expression, prejudice at trial because of nationality, and inadequate protection against the death penalty): leave would be granted unless, within three weeks, the U.S. Government and the Home Secretary gave assurances that he could rely on the First Amendment, would not be prejudiced at trial or sentencing because of his nationality, would receive the same First Amendment protections as a U.S. citizen and would not face the death penalty; if assurances were given, a further hearing on May 20 would decide whether they were satisfactory.⁠[27]

On May 20, 2024, the High Court granted him permission to bring a full appeal against extradition, on free-speech protections and on the argument that as a foreign national he might not be able to rely on the First Amendment protections available to U.S. citizens.⁠[3][5]

After weeks of negotiations, he and the U.S. authorities signed a plea agreement on June 19, 2024, under which he would plead guilty to one criminal count and be sentenced to time served; on June 20, Westminster Magistrates’ Court held a private bail hearing. In the early hours of June 24 he was released from Belmarsh prison, spent several hours at Stansted Airport, boarded a chartered flight at 5 p.m. and left England and Wales at 6.36 p.m.; the Justice Department and Assange announced the deal that day.⁠[28][3]

On June 25, WikiLeaks announced on X that “Julian Assange is free”; the charter flight stopped over in Bangkok on its way to Saipan.⁠[28]

On the morning of June 26, 2024 (local time), in the U.S. District Court for the Northern Mariana Islands in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands, he pleaded guilty to conspiring with Chelsea Manning, then a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, to unlawfully obtain and disclose classified documents relating to the national defense. The court sentenced him to 62 months, equal to the time he had spent in British custody, so that he served no further time; he then left the United States for Australia and may not return without permission. The Justice Department’s release of June 25 states that WikiLeaks solicited classified information, that Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of classified documents and sent them to Assange, and that he published many documents without redacting the names of human sources, putting them at risk.⁠[23][2][29][30]

In court he said: “I believe the First Amendment and the Espionage Act are in contradiction with each other,” while accepting that such a case would be hard to win; and he said that he accepted the consequences of soliciting classified information from sources for publication. His U.S. lawyer, Barry Pollack, called the prosecution “unprecedented” under the Espionage Act, said that Assange had revealed “truthful, important and newsworthy information” and should never have been charged; the Justice Department said that his decision to reveal the names of human sources “created a grave and imminent risk to human life.” Stella Assange said that a guilty plea under the Espionage Act was “obviously a very serious concern for journalists” and that she would seek a full pardon.⁠[29][30][23]

That day he flew by charter jet to Canberra, accompanied by Australia’s Ambassador to the United States, Kevin Rudd, and High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, Stephen Smith; his wife, Stella Assange, and his father, John Shipton, met him on the tarmac. He phoned Prime Minister Anthony Albanese from the tarmac, and his lawyer Jennifer Robinson said he said to Albanese that the Australian government’s intervention had saved his life; Albanese said Assange described the landing as “a surreal and happy moment” and said in Parliament that his freedom was the result of the government’s “careful, patient and determined work.” Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said the “Assange team” had paid for the flights and that the government had helped facilitate the transport.⁠[30]

On June 28, 2024, Mr Justice Johnson approved a consent order of the High Court: the United States having notified the Home Secretary by diplomatic note No. 625 of June 26 that the extradition request was withdrawn, Assange was discharged, the Home Secretary’s extradition order was quashed, the appeal proceedings were discontinued, the appeal hearing listed for July 9 and 10 was vacated, and no order for costs was made.⁠[31]

On October 1, 2024, accompanied by his wife, Stella, he gave evidence in Strasbourg, France, at a hearing of the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on his detention and conviction, his first public remarks since his release about four months earlier; the hearing preceded the Assembly’s plenary debate scheduled for October 2. He said: “I am not free today because the system worked,” and “I am free today because after years of incarceration I pleaded guilty to journalism,” adding that what he had pleaded guilty to was seeking information from a source and informing the public what that information was. WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson also attended.⁠[32][33]

On October 2 the Assembly adopted a resolution based on the report of the Icelandic parliamentarian Thorhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir, finding that his treatment warranted designation as a “political prisoner” under the Assembly’s 2012 definition, pointing to the severe U.S. charges, which could have meant life imprisonment, and his conviction under the Espionage Act “for what was – in essence – newsgathering and publishing.” It urged the United States, a Council of Europe observer state, to investigate the alleged war crimes and human rights violations disclosed by him and WikiLeaks and to “urgently reform” the 1917 Espionage Act, and found that the United Kingdom had failed to protect effectively his freedom of expression and right to liberty.⁠[34][32]

In May 2025 he and his wife attended the 78th Cannes Film Festival, where The Six Billion Dollar Man, Eugene Jarecki’s documentary about his fight against extradition, was shown as a special screening. A photocall was held on May 20, and the couple walked the red carpet on the evening of May 21, wearing a brooch showing the British designer Vivienne Westwood holding a sign reading “Stop Killing”; he first appeared before the global press in a T-shirt bearing the names of children killed in Gaza and then walked the red carpet in a tuxedo with the film’s team. He did not speak at any of these appearances.⁠[10][35]

At Cannes, Stella Assange said that he had been through a “very grave situation” in prison, was recovering and making plans, and was “very, very concerned about the state of the world”; she added that he was considering how to become “politically active again” once fully recovered.⁠[10]

In December 2025 he filed a criminal complaint in Sweden against the Nobel Foundation over the award of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize to the Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, naming 30 people associated with the foundation. The complaint alleged “gross misappropriation” of funds, facilitation of war crimes and crimes against humanity and financing of crimes of aggression, arguing that the prize had turned “an instrument of peace” into “an instrument of war”; invoking Alfred NobelAlfred NobelAlfred Nobel (1833–1896) was a Swedish chemist, engineer, inventor and industrialist who invented dynamite, the blasting cap, blasting gelatine and the smokeless powder ballistite and founded enterprises in more than 20 countries. Through his will he left his fortune to establish the five Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and peace.Open the full entry’s 1895 will, he asked for the 11 million Swedish kronor in prize money due to Machado to be frozen, and argued that the Stockholm-based foundation, not the Norwegian committee that chooses the laureate, bore financial responsibility.⁠[36]

On December 19, 2025, Swedish police said they would not open an investigation; Detective Inspector Rikard Ekman said that the complaint contained no information suggesting that a crime had been committed and that “no investigation will be conducted on the basis of the complaint.”⁠[37]

Accounts of his university studies differ: the Evening Standard article says that after travelling in Asia he enrolled at Central Queensland University and then at the University of Melbourne; Store norske leksikon says that he studied science and information technology at the University of Queensland and later in Melbourne; Encyclopædia Britannica says that he studied physics at the University of Melbourne. He did not complete a degree.⁠[4][2][1]

The Evening Standard article says that in those years he was part of Melbourne’s rave scene, helped install an internet kiosk at the club night Psychic Harmony, and was nicknamed “Prof” there.⁠[4]

As a teenager he married Teresa, then 16, whom he had met through a programme for gifted children, and they had a son; Store norske leksikon says he had his first child at 18 and that the marriage soon ended. The Evening Standard article says that Teresa left with their son, which led to a custody battle in which his mother was involved. It adds that he and his mother set up an organization to campaign against local child-protection authorities.⁠[4][2]

His wife, Stella Assange, is a South African-born lawyer, born Sara Gonzalez Devant (Store norske leksikon describes her as Swedish-Spanish and as one of his lawyers), whom he met in 2011 and who changed her name to Stella Moris in 2012; during his years in the Ecuadorian embassy they had two sons, Gabriel and Max. They became engaged in 2017.⁠[4][2][30]

On his return to Australia in 2024, his father, John Shipton, said he hoped his son was coming home to the “great beauty of ordinary life.”⁠[30]

Besides Underground (1997, with Suelette Dreyfus), Julian Assange: The Unauthorised Autobiography (2011) and Cypherpunks (2012), his writings include the essay “Conspiracy as Governance” (2006) and the book When Google Met WikiLeaks (2014). Screen works about him and WikiLeaks include the Australian television drama Underground: The Julian Assange Story (2012), the award-winning Australian short film Julian (2012) about a nine-year-old Assange, the DreamWorks thriller The Fifth Estate (2013) and the American documentary We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (2013); the documentary Mediastan (2013) was produced by Assange as a response to The Fifth Estate.⁠[2]

WikiLeaks: Official website: https://wikileaks.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[38]