After a 14-year-long ordeal, involving a seven-year asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and a five-year incarceration in the high-security Belmarsh Prison, Julian Assange, who earned global fame for releasing classified American documents, is finally a free man. Assange, now 51, stepped into freedom outside of an American court in the US Pacific island territory of Saipan on Wednesday after pleading guilty to a criminal count of conspiring to obtain and disclose classified defence documents. As he was sentenced to time he had already served in prison, he was allowed to head home to Australia.

Assange’s freedom has come as a relief to his supporters across the globe, especially so for those who value the disclosures made by the company he founded, WikiLeaks. In November 2010, WikiLeaks had released over 250,000 US diplomatic cables with the help of Chelsea Manning, a former US army soldier who was convicted under the US Espionage Act and had her sentence commuted by President Barack Obama. The WikiLeaks exposed, among other things, the fact that the US forces in Baghdad had killed 11 people in a 2007 helicopter attack; criticism of the UK’s military operation in Afghanistan by US commanders and the Afghan president; and thousands of US diplomatic cables that revealed how the US used its embassies for espionage. In 2016, WikiLeaks again came to prominence after exposing thousands of hacked emails of the Democratic National Committee, causing a possible setback for the US Democratic Party presidential candidate Hilary Clinton. WikiLeaks was then accused of collaborating with the Russian government to influence the US presidential elections, which Donald Trump, Clinton’s opponent, won.

Shaken by the incriminating revelations on their modus operandi, Western nations, led by the US, launched an all-out war against Assange and WikiLeaks. Assange’s global legitimacy took a hit after Sweden’s abortive attempt to prosecute him for sexual allegations and the Ecuadorian Embassy’s allegation of rude behaviour while staying with them as a refugee-guest. Beyond the questions of his personal conduct, though, Assange continued to be considered a victim of the Western world’s crusade against the free press. Assange found his champions, among other global intellectuals, in Noam Chomsky and Arundhati Roy, both of whom condemned the US government’s anti-democratic attempts at silencing a journalist-crusader.

In a strange turn of events, Roy, Indian writer known for speaking on behalf of the freedom of the country’s impoverished Adivasis and Dalits, now faces sedition charges in her home country for a speech she made in 2010. The hounding of Roy is a clear case of the Indian government, led by the right-wing strongman Narendra Modi, silencing dissenting voices. In Nepal, Kailash Sirohiya, the publisher of The Kathmandu Post, spent nine days in jail last month and continues to face prosecution for an alleged forgery of citizenship certificates while in reality, he is being hounded for his publication’s consistent coverage of the corruption allegations against Home Minister Rabi Lamichhane. The abuse of authority to silence journalists, intellectuals and dissenters is a global phenomenon today. Julian Assange’s ordeal is a reality check of the price one must pay for speaking truth to power.