WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange told the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe on Tuesday that his confession to espionage charges was necessary because legal and political efforts to protect his freedom were insufficient.
Photo: TASR/AP, Pascal Bastien
Pictured is the founder of the WikiLeaks platform, Julian Assange, during his address to the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg on October 1, 2024.
“I finally chose freedom over an impossible justice,” Assange said in his first public statement since his release from prison.
Assange partially pleaded guilty to espionage in connection with the publication of secret documents relating mainly to the operations of the US military in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to his own words, he believed that by publishing these materials he was acting within the limits of the US constitutional right to free speech. After this confession, the American authorities agreed to release him from custody in Britain. He spent five years there, awaiting possible extradition to the United States for prosecution.
“After years of imprisonment, I am free today because I pleaded guilty to journalism, guilty of obtaining information from sources…guilty of informing the public,” Assange added.
According to the conclusions of the report of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Assange was a political prisoner. The report also called on Britain to investigate whether Assange was subjected to inhumane treatment.
“I’m not yet in a state to talk about what I’ve been through. Isolation has taken its toll,” Assange said. Sitting next to him was his wife Stella, whom he had married while in London’s Belmarsh Prison. She said in August that her husband would need some time for his health and mental state to improve after his long imprisonment.
Among WikiLeaks’ most controversial leaks are classified US military documents and videos from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in the first half of the 2000s, which highlighted the inhumane treatment of prisoners, human rights violations and civilian deaths. According to US authorities, these leaks endangered national security and the lives of secret agents.
Source: spravy.pravda.sk
