The founder of WikiLeaks breaks silence before a Council of Europe commission in Strasbourg
▲ Julian Assange, with his wife Stella, during yesterday’s hearing in Strasbourg.Photo Afp
Afp
La Jornada Newspaper
Wednesday, October 2, 2024, p. 30
Strasbourg. The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, assured yesterday before the Council of Europe that he was released after declaring guilty of having done journalismin his first statements since his release in June from a prison in the United Kingdom.
I am not free today because the system worked, but because, after years of imprisonment, I pleaded guilty to having done journalismsaid Assange, who spent the last 14 years imprisoned between the Ecuadorian embassy in London and the British prison.
Assange, 53, broke his silence for the first time since his release in June from London’s Belmarsh prison, before a Council of Europe commission in Strasbourg, northeastern France, examining the conditions and impact of his detention. .
His release occurred under an agreement with the United States justice system, in which he pleaded guilty to obtaining and disseminating information on national defense, including accounts of extrajudicial executions and information about allies.
I pleaded guilty to seeking information from a source and I pleaded guilty to informing the public of the nature of that information. I did not plead guilty to any other charges.said the Australian, dressed in a suit and tie.
Declared freeman by US justice, he returned to Australia and was reunited with his family. Since then he has not been seen much, although WikiLeaks and his wife Stella, who accompanied him in his testimony, have been providing some information.
Last Wednesday, his organization explained that it would testify in person before the Council of Europe given the exceptional nature of the invitation.
He is still recovering
Everyone can see that he’s exhausted, that he’s still recoveringStella Assange declared this Tuesday after the hour and a half meeting in Strasbourg.
Her husband said he hopes his testimony can help those whose cases are less visible but who are just as vulnerableand denounced that there is every time more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self-censorship.
Journalism is not a crime, it is the pillar of a free and informed societyhe stressed.
The Council of Europe is an organization of 46 countries not linked to the European Union and dedicated to promoting human rights on the continent. Among its organizations it has the Parliamentary Assembly and the European Court of Human Rights.
Today the Parliamentary Assembly will debate a report, prepared by the Icelandic parliamentarian Thorhildur Sunna Aevarsdottir, which considers disproportionate prosecutions and sentences against the Australian, whom he describes as political prisoner.
This report is also the basis of a draft resolution that urges the United States to investigate alleged war crimes and human rights violations revealed by him and WikiLeaksdeclared the organization.
The moment and place chosen by Assange to break his silence have baffled some jurists, especially when the founder of WikiLeaks is fighting to obtain a presidential pardon in the United States for his conviction for espionage.
Chelsea Manning, the army intelligence analyst who leaked the hundreds of thousands of documents to Assange, spent seven years in prison before then-President Barack Obama commuted her 35-year prison sentence in 2017.
US President Joe Biden, who is likely to grant some pardons before leaving office in January, has in the past called the Australian a high tech terrorist.
His supporters celebrate him as a defender of freedom of expression and journalism, but his detractors maintain that the publication of sensitive documents put the lives of numerous people and the security of the United States at risk.
Continue the fight!Assange cried at the end of his speech, in which he showed signs of fatigue.
