Strasbourg:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange said Tuesday that he was freed after years in prison only because he confessed to “journalism,” which he described as a pillar of a free society.

Assange has spent most of the past 14 years evading arrest either in the Ecuadorian embassy in London or locked up in Belmarsh prison in the British capital.

He was released from prison in June after serving a sentence for publishing millions of classified US government documents.

“I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of imprisonment because I pleaded guilty to journalism,” Assange told the Council of Europe at the Strasbourg headquarters in his first public comments since his release. Told the rights organization.

“I ultimately chose freedom over an inescapable justice… justice for me is now withheld,” Assange said, adding that he was facing up to 175 years in prison.

Speaking calmly with his wife Stella fighting for his release, he added: “Journalism is not a crime, it is a pillar of a free and informed society.”

“The basic problem is very simple,” Assange said.

The trove of classified documents released by WikiLeaks includes explicit statements by the US State Department about foreign leaders, extrajudicial killings and intelligence gathering against allies.

Assange argued that his case provided insight into “how powerful intelligence organizations are involved in international coercion against their enemies”, adding that this “cannot become the norm here.”

‘More privacy, more privacy’

He said that “ground has been lost” during his imprisonment, lamenting that he now sees “more immunity, more secrecy and more reprisals for telling the truth”.

“Freedom of expression and what comes from it is at a dark crossroads,” he told a hearing of the legal committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE).

“Let us all resolve to do our part to ensure that the light of freedom never dims and that the pursuit of truth lives on and that the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few,” he said. Will be.”

Assange’s case is still very controversial.

Supporters hailed him as a champion of free speech and said he was persecuted by the authorities and unjustly imprisoned. Critics see him as a reckless blogger whose uncensored publication of highly sensitive documents has endangered lives and threatened American security.

US President Joe Biden, who is likely to issue some pardons before he leaves office next January, has previously branded Assange a “terrorist”.

Assange’s choice of time and place has surprised some observers.

The Council of Europe brings together the 46 signatory states to the European Convention on Human Rights, which has little to say about Assange’s legal fate.

Assange is still campaigning for a US presidential pardon for his conviction under the Espionage Act.

(Other than the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Arrest of Julian Assange



Source link