The Council of Europe recognized Julian Assange as a political prisoner this Wednesday, in a resolution approved by a comfortable majority in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Strasbourg-based institution. In the same decision, the organization urges the United States to reform the Espionage Act for which it prosecuted the founder of Wikileaks.
The 53-year-old Australian regained the freedom of which he was deprived for more than a decade last June, after reaching a judicial agreement with Washington in which he accepted a five-year sentence. A sentence that the American justice system deemed fulfilled with his stay in a maximum security British prison since he was removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2019, where he was a refugee for another seven years.
As Assange recalled on Tuesday in Strasbourg, in his first public appearance since arriving as a “free man” in Australia, the payment was to plead guilty “to doing journalism”, an extreme that, according to the now validated resolution of the Council of Europe, has had a “deterrent effect” on human rights and press freedom that goes far beyond the case of the leader of the leak platform.
“The Assembly considers that the disproportionately serious charges brought by the United States against Julian Assange under the Espionage Act, exposing him to a risk of conviction de facto to life imprisonment, combined with his conviction and sentence under that law for what, in essence, was a collection and publication of news, meets the criteria (…) of the definition of a political prisoner and justifies the designation of Assange as a political prisoner. , indicates the text of the resolution approved with 88 votes in favor, 13 against and 20 abstentions. The Council of Europe is a non-legislative international body made up of 46 States – including the 27 members of the EU – that ensures human rights, democracy and the rule of law.
The founder of WikiLeaks, who followed the debate on the resolution from the guest gallery, celebrated the approval of the text with his usual raised fist before leaving the chamber accompanied by his lawyers and his wife, Stella Assange.
Subsequently, he met, behind closed doors – Assange has avoided all contact with the press – with former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa, who came to Strasbourg to witness the vote. His Government (2007-17) granted him political asylum in 2012 at its embassy in London, where the Australian locked himself up after a British court approved his extradition to Sweden for a case of alleged rape that the Australian always denied. Assange has linked that case to the United States’ judicial persecution for publishing hundreds of thousands of classified documents on Iraq and Afghanistan in 2010, including a video in which US soldiers are seen shooting two reporters from the Reuters agency from a helicopter. in Baghdad. That same year, WikiLeaks also leaked to several international newspapers, including EL PAÍS, more than 200,000 diplomatic cables from the US State Department, the so-called Cablegatewhich shook world diplomacy.
His recognition by the Council of Europe as a political prisoner is “a great step, but only a first great step to settle accounts with history,” Correa assessed in statements to journalists. The persecution of the founder of WikiLeaks “worked” for the United States, he lamented: “It is a message that worked as a deterrent effect, so that no one else dares to report war crimes in the United States. They have achieved that, but at least “We are beginning to settle accounts with history so that something similar never happens again,” added the former president, who revealed that until this Wednesday he did not know Assange personally and that, although it was under his mandate that he was granted asylum, “more “That justified,” they never maintained contact during the seven years he remained in the Ecuadorian embassy.
The resolution on Assange also considers that the “inappropriate use” of the Espionage Act against Assange “has caused a dangerous deterrent effect, discouraging editors, journalists and reporters from reporting on inappropriate government conduct, which has severely undermined the freedom of expression and has opened the space for more abuses by state authorities.” For this reason, Strasbourg urges the United States, an observer country, to “urgently reform” the Espionage Law to, among others, “exclude” from its implementation “editors, journalists and informants who reveal classified information with the intention of alerting and report serious crimes such as murder, torture, corruption or illegal surveillance.”
It also urges Washington to “cooperate in good faith” with the Spanish justice system to “clarify all the facts of the alleged illegal surveillance of Assange and his interlocutors in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.” As revealed by an investigation by EL PAÍS, a Spanish private security company, Undercover Global SL, hired to protect the diplomatic legation between 2012 and 2018, subjected the cyberactivist and the people who visited him to espionage, especially his lawyers and collaborators.
