Speaking for the first time in public since his June 24, 2024 release from the HM Prison Belmarsh, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange testified yesterday before the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg, France, as covered in Consortium News. PACE had played an important role in fighting for Assange’s freedom during the five years of his incarceration without charge at the high-security Belmarsh prison, as he fought extradition to the United States. In his hard-hitting and moving testimony, he asserted: “I’m not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism. I pled guilty to seeking information from a source … to obtaining information from a source. And I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.”
His powerful presentation detailed the extent of his persecution by the combined forces of the CIA, FBI, U.S. Justice Department and other U.S. government agencies, which expected to extradite him to the U.S. and stand trial on charges that he had violated the 1917 Espionage Act. His case was one of criminalization of journalism, free speech, and the impossibility of finding any state that would grant him asylum, he described, but his broader warning was that “the criminalization of news-gathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere. I was formally convicted by a foreign power for asking, for receiving and publishing truthful information about that power, while I was in Europe.”
