Freed last June under a “plea deal” with the US Department of Justice, Julian Assange made his first public appearance at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, where he was heard by the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights on the morning of Tuesday 1 October.
Clearly very tired, the WikiLeaks founder was accompanied by his wife, Stella, and one of his oldest travelling companions, Icelandic investigative journalist Kristinn Hrafnsson, now editor-in-chief of WikiLeaks.
“My life out of prison is going to require a lot of adjustment”, he confided, before going on to talk about the agreement that enabled him to return to Australia, where he now lives with his family.
“I pled guilty to journalism. I pled guilty to seeking information from a source [whistleblower Chelsea Manning, editor’s note]. I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice, after being detained for years and facing a 175-year sentence with no effective remedy”.
Prosecuted for having disclosed, from 2010 and in partnership with major international media, hundreds of thousands of classified documents concerning the military and diplomatic activities of the United States, as well as accounts of extrajudicial executions and intelligence gathering against Washington’s allies, Julian Assange spent seven years cloistered in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, before being incarcerated in 2019 in the high-security Belmarsh prison until this “plea deal” was reached “for obtaining and disclosing information on national security”.
He was then sentenced to a term already served in pre-trial detention and released.
His hearing before the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is linked to the debate on Wednesday 2 October on a report by Icelandic Socialist Thorhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir (Pirate Party) on “the detention and conviction of Julian Assange and their chilling effects on human rights”.
“Julian Assange did what investigative journalists do. He gathered information from sources and published it. It was the whistleblower who was prosecuted, not the criminals, but the person who denounces crimes”, she declared.
The report is very detailed, and is accompanied by a resolution calling on the United States - an observer state at the Council of Europe - to urgently reform the 1917 Espionage Act and to exclude journalists and whistleblowers when they report “on serious crimes such as murder, torture, corruption or illegal surveillance”.
She also calls on the United Kingdom to review its extradition legislation as a matter of urgency in order to protect people prosecuted for political reasons.
The 46 member states of the Council of Europe, for their part, are urged to grant protection to whistleblowers who expose the illegal activities of their government.
“The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which is one of the great standard-setting powers in the world, must act in the face of international repression that cannot become the norm”, insisted Mr Assange.
Today, he said, there is “even more vengeance against those who tell the truth, even more self-censorship”.
He denounced the “chilled climate for freedom of expression that exists now” when “powerful nations feel entitled to target individuals beyond their borders, those individuals don’t stand a chance unless there are strong safeguards and a state determined to enforce them”.
“What happened to me must never happen again to any journalist”, he concluded. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)