Immediately after the deal was recognized, Assange was released in the courtroom. The United States withdrew the request for his extradition. Now lawyers in the state of Virginia, as promised earlier, should drop the remaining charges against the journalist.
On June 26, the District Court of the Northern Mariana Islands held a hearing to decide whether to recognize the deal between the U.S. authorities and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Judge Manglona, after listening to the arguments of the parties, approved the deal and finally released the journalist, who for about seven years took refuge in the building of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and then spent more than five years in the British high-security prison Belmarsh. All these years, U.S. authorities sought his extradition, where he faced 175 years in prison on 18 charges.
After the court accepted a plea deal on one count, U.S. prosecutors promised to drop charges against him on the others. The journalist's five-year prison sentence will be counted as time already served.
On June 24, the High Court in London released Julian Assange and he headed to the Northern Mariana Islands, which are in the Pacific Ocean near his homeland of Australia.
Assange pleaded guilty to espionage charges.
His lawyer Barry Pollack said on ABC television, the court agreed that Assange's publications caused no harm.
"We know they were newsworthy, we know they were quoted by every major news outlet on the planet, and we know they revealed important information. That's called journalism," Pollack said, adding that U.S. authorities consider journalism a crime.