Regardless of what Judge Ramona V Manglona decided about his plea deal in her Saipan courtroom on Wednesday, Julian Assange was going home. That’s not because Judge Manglona was some kind of Pacific outpost rubber-stamp. It’s because the US government promised in writing that Assange would be allowed to back to Australia.

The fine print of the deal the Australian Wikileaks publisher’s lawyers struck with the United States Department of Justice to plead guilty in return for his freedom reveals the US had guaranteed that even if the judge rejected it, or tried to modify it, Assange was going to be allowed to fly on to Australia.

It’s a highly unorthodox legal arrangement in a highly unusual case and reveals both just how tricky these negotiations were and how much all the stakeholders – including the US government – really wanted it resolved.

Pleading guilty to espionage – a felony under US law – required that Assange appear in court in person. He and his lawyers had insisted he would not agree to attend a mainland US court because of the risk of being ambushed by some legal manoeuvre that stopped him leaving.

So the DoJ proposed Saipan in the North Mariana Islands, a tiny American Pacific outpost, relatively close to Australia.

The 23-page agreement facilitating this allowed either party to withdraw if the court in Saipan did not accept it. If Assange withdrew, then the Saipan arrangement would be off and he would have to appear before an eastern district of Virginia court in the US.

Paragraph 14 provided a backup plan in the form of a series of cascading clauses to ensure that whatever happened in Saipan, provided he kept his side of the deal, Assange would be free.

It said if the Saipan judge refused to endorse it, or imposed a different sentence, and either party withdrew as a result – which they clearly would – Assange was to be released on bail and allowed to continue to Australia.

If the Saipan court detained him based on admissions in the agreement, the US would dismiss the information within it until he could leave US territory and then refile it, once he’d gone. It also agreed not to detain him pursuant to the indictment that was then still pending in Virginia.

In........

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