The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, broke this Tuesday the silence he had maintained since his release in June after 12 years in prison to make it clear that if today he can move again without fear of being arrested and extradited to the United States, it is not because neither the system nor the safeguards provided to protect freedom of expression worked, but because he gave in to pressure and pleaded guilty to “doing journalism.”
“I want to be clear: I am not free today because the system worked,” he said. “If I am free, it is because I pleaded guilty to doing journalism, I pleaded guilty to seeking and obtaining information from a source, and guilty to telling the public that information. “I did not plead guilty to anything else,” the Australian stressed during a hearing of the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), in Strasbourg. Assange has asked that the responsible institutions “act” so that what happened to him for publishing classified information “does not happen again.”
“Journalism is not a crime”
“A journalist should not be persecuted for doing his job, journalism is not a crime, it is a pillar of a free and informed society,” he stressed to applause from the parliamentarians, whom he asked not to let their guard down. “If there is a future in Europe today in which the freedom to speak and publish the truth is not the privilege of a few, but the right of all, they must act so that what happened in my case never happens to anyone again” . Starting, he said, by reviewing the legal protections for informants because “many exist only on paper.”
His presence at the Council of Europe this Tuesday and Wednesday, in which his case and the “deterrent effects on human rights” it has had are discussed, constitutes Assange’s first departure from his native Australia since, after an agreement with American justice, was released at the end of June from the maximum security British prison where he spent the last five years. It is also the first time that the 53-year-old Australian has broken his silence “since before his imprisonment, in 2019,” about his case, as Wikileaks has highlighted. And he has done so to reveal that part of the agreement with the North American Department of Justice implies the impossibility of him being able to judicially attack his harassment for more than a decade, the extradition procedure, or being able to access records of his case through the United States Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
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Assange, dressed in a suit and with a neat beard, went early in the morning to the headquarters of the Council of Europe accompanied by his wife, the lawyer Stella Assange. The Australian has not made any statements to the press before entering the hearing room, where he has testified for a long hour before legislators from the 46 member states of the Strasbourg-based institution.
His statement has been developed between constant throat clearing and pauses, at a time when, he has acknowledged, he is still trying to “readapt” to normal life after more than a decade locked up, first seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and then in a prison. British maximum security. “I have lost 14 years of my life,” he has said on several occasions. It was in 2010 when the judicial process against him began when he was accused by the Swedish prosecutor of sexual harassment.
“I have come a long way to be here, literally and figuratively,” he noted, indicating that the isolation to which he was subjected for so many years “takes its toll.” “Speaking here is a challenge,” he admitted.
