The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, has returned to European territory to testify this Tuesday, before the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, about the long judicial process that kept him deprived of liberty for 12 years and the “deterrent effects on human rights.” that your case has had. It is the first time that the 53-year-old Australian has broken his silence “since before his imprisonment, in 2019,” to officially testify about his case, as highlighted by the leak platform created by Assange in 2006.
The hacker plans to make a statement this Tuesday and answer questions during a hearing organized by the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), within the framework of a report prepared by the Icelandic rapporteur Thorhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir about her case. In the middle of the month, this commission already expressed in a proposed resolution – which will be debated and approved on Wednesday by the plenary session, with the assistance once again of the founder of Wikileaks – its “deep concern” about the “harsh” treatment given to Assange. Something that, the commission warns, can have a “deterrent effect” on human rights and create an “environment of self-censorship that affects all journalists, editors and other people who report on issues essential for the functioning of a democratic society.” .
The resolution also calls on the United States, which is an observer country of the Strasbourg-based organization and to which 46 States belong, to “investigate the alleged war crimes and human rights violations revealed by it.” [Assange] and Wikileaks.” The responsible commission also proposes, among others, a “reform” of the US Espionage Act and better protection for informants.
According to the commission, the “disproportionately serious charges” that the North American justice system presented against Assange, as well as the harsh penalties provided for by the Espionage Law for carrying out journalistic work, make Assange meet the criteria established by the Council of Europe in 2012. to define a “political prisoner.”
Confirming his first trip abroad since his release, Wikileaks explained last week that, with this Tuesday’s hearing, “his first official testimony on his case since before his imprisonment, in 2019,” Assange seeks to “emphasize the broader implications.” “broad aspects of your case” regarding freedom of expression and human rights. The event will also allow “to hear the conclusions that his imprisonment was politically motivated,” the platform highlighted.
Assange returned to his native Australia at the end of June, after spending 12 years in prison – seven of them held in the Ecuadorian embassy in London and five more in a maximum security prison, also in the United Kingdom – and after agreeing to plead. guilty of espionage in a US court in the Northern Mariana Islands, in the Pacific Ocean.
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Before that agreement, the US Department of Justice accused Assange of 17 crimes against the Espionage Act and one for computer interference. The leader of Wikileaks faced a maximum sentence of 175 years in prison, mainly for the leak of more than 200,000 classified documents from the US State Department in November 2010. EL PAÍS was one of the media that participated in the concerted effort to publication of those diplomatic cables from the State Department that shook world diplomacy.
Cablegateas one of the largest document leaks in history was called, revealed the management of US foreign policy, such as the change in relations with China and North Korea and Washington’s order to spy on the Secretary General of the UN, then Ban Ki-moon.
The agreement with Washington, in which he accepted a five-year prison sentence that was completed, allowed him to return to his country as a “free man,” as the judge who quickly decided the case said before Assange returned to prison. take a plane to land, definitively, in Canberra on June 26. Since then, the hacker has maintained a discreet profile, away from all social networks, as his wife—and spokesperson, along with Wikileaks—underlined in August.
Something that has changed this week: Assange landed in Paris on Monday, accompanied by his wife and the two young children he had with her during his confinement in the Ecuadorian embassy. Together they traveled by train to Strasbourg, as shown in some images published by Wikileaks on its X account. The Australian will remain in Strasbourg until at least Wednesday. His entourage has already announced that he does not plan to make statements to the press, although his wife, lawyer Stella Assange, is expected to speak after the first day at the Council of Europe.
According to Wikileaks, Assange “continues to recover after his release” and, if he has decided to go to Strasbourg, it is due to the “exceptional nature of the invitation” and to thank “the support received by the PACE and its delegates in recent years”, in which the Strasbourg institution repeatedly demanded his release.
