The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has been a free man since Monday morning, after spending the last five years (1,901 days) in prison for publishing highly classified US defense secrets on his platforms.

However, Julian Assange's release is based on an agreement with the US courts in which he pleaded guilty to the charges.

He was detained in the maximum security prison in Belmarsh, in the United Kingdom, where he was flown to the Mariana Islands. There he is due to undergo a hearing and then be flown to his country of origin, Australia.

"He was granted bail by the High Court in London and was released at Stansted Airport in the afternoon, where he boarded a plane and left the UK," reads a Wikileaks post on the X platform (formerly Twitter).

This is the result of a worldwide campaign that encompassed grassroots organizers, press freedom activists, legislators and leaders from across the political spectrum, all the way to the United Nations. This created the space for a long period of negotiations with the US Department of Justice, which led to an agreement that has yet to be formally finalized.

In 2010, Wikileaks published a series of documents relating to US operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The data was provided by whistleblower Chelsea Elizabeth Manning, who is a US politician, activist, whistleblower and military officer.

At the same time, Sweden accused him of sexual assault and requested his extradition, whereupon he took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The US authorities then accused him of espionage and requested Assange's extradition.

A police operation extracted him from the embassy in 2019 and he has been in an isolated 2×3 meter cell in the Belmarsh high security prison ever since.

A broad worldwide movement has been pushing for Assange's release. At the time of his release, Wikileaks and his family thanked the movement. Assange should soon be back in the company of his wife Stella, whom he married in prison, and their two children, who have only just met their imprisoned father. (Sources: Euro News and Wikeleaks. Image: DR)