Julian Assange addresses Council of Europe in first public speech as a free man

Julian Assange made his first public appearance after liberation on Tuesday 1 October at a hearing of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg whose focus was the chilling effect of his detention and conviction on human rights.

The Council of Europe is the guardian of human rights in Europe, with 47 members across the continent. The WikiLeaks Publisher addressed the members of PACE’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights to discuss the threats posed to media freedom through his prosecution, highlighting how prosecuting authorities in the US were able to violate principles embedded in the European Convention of Human Rights.

After a brief introduction by Lord Richard Keen, chairperson of the Assembly’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, the floor was given to the Rapporteur who produced a report on the Assange case, the Icelandic parliamentarian Thorhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir. A resolution based on her report, which concludes that Assange meets the definition of a political prisoner, will be discussed in a full plenary debate by PACE on 2 October.

“Over the years, Wikileaks has published and revealed gruesome instances of war crimes, enforced disappearances, torture, corruption, abductions, and scores of different forms of human rights violations. Julian Assange did what investigative journalists routinely do,” the rapporteur said of Julian Assange’s role.

Assange started his speech underlining that the experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey though it is one he shared with other prisoners. “I am yet not fully equipped to speak about what I have endured, the relentless struggle to stay alive, both physically and mentally, nor can I speak yet about the deaths by hanging, murder and medical neglect of my fellow prisoners,” he said.

The WikiLeaks’ founder expressed gratitude for the 2020 PACE resolution calling for his liberation, which stated that his imprisonment set a dangerous precedent for journalists. He also mentioned the 2021 statement where PACE put on records its concern over reports that US officials discussed his assassination.

He also thanked the public figures and civil society representatives who mobilisation was necessary in order to secure his freedom. “This unprecedented global effort was needed because the legal protections that did exist mainly existed only on paper and were not effective in any remotely reasonable time.”

“I am not free today because the system worked”

Assange pointed out that he had to choose “freedom over unrealisable justice” after being detained for years. ‘I am 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. And I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else.”

It is debatable whether the charge Assange was obliged to plead guilty to would even constitute a crime in Europe. Article 10 of the ECHR protects the ability of journalists to serve the public and, as we have often noted, the protection of whistleblowing has greatly advanced both in European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) case law and in EU legislation over the past few years.

However, Assange won’t be able to file his case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Under the terms of his US plea agreement he cannot file a case to the European Court of Human Rights nor a Freedom of Information Act request over what he was subject to because of the US extradition request.

The hope of the Australian publisher is that his case could show the “weaknesses of the existing safeguards” and “help those whose cases are less visible, but who are equally vulnerable.”

He told the audience that, after leaving the maximum-security prison of Belmarsh – which he described as a ‘“dungeon” – this summer, he found a changed world characterised by “more impunity, more secrecy[and] more retaliation for telling the truth.”

The attempt of the US to criminalise national security journalism at a global level was referred to by Assange as a “passing of the Rubicon” and he said it is not difficult “to draw a line from the US government's prosecution … [and]… the chilled climate for freedom of expression that exists now.”

The history of a prosecution

Assange then turned to the founding ideas behind WikiLeaks and the chain of events that had led to his arrest. “When I founded Wikileaks, I was driven by a simple dream, to educate people about how the world works so that, through understanding, we might bring about something better… knowledge empowers the individuals to hold power to account.”

Emphasising the European roots of WikiLeaks as a project, he said: “I lived in Paris, and we had formal corporate registrations in France and in Iceland. Our journalistic and technical staff were spread throughout Europe. We published to the world from servers based in France, in Germany, and in Norway. But 14 years ago, the United States military arrested one of our alleged whistleblowers, Private First Class Manning, a US intelligence analyst based in Iraq. The US government concurrently launched an investigation against me and my colleagues.”

Assange indicated that Mike Pompeo, head of the CIA during Trump’s presidency, was the key figure behind the illicit plans that the US made in relation to him, in particular, the project to assassinate him while he was a refugee at the Ecuadorian Embassy. Emphasising how unwritten rules had been broken during this period period, Assange said: “President Obama's Justice Department chose not to indict me, recognising that no crime had been committed. The United States had never prosecuted a publisher for publishing or obtaining government information. To do so would require a radical and ominous reinterpretation of the US Constitution. In January 2017, Obama also commuted the sentence of Manning, who had been convicted of being one of my sources.”

In Assange’s view, the landscape changed in February 2017, after Trump’s election. At the beginning of the same year WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA's infiltration of French political parties and huge production of malware along with the spying on French industry. In the wake of this and other revelations, the CIA Director Pompeo launched a campaign against the media organisation which was ultimately an initiative against media freedom.

After the US extradition request was sent, he charged under the US Espionage Act – a draconian law that does not allow defendants to refer to the public interest. As clarified in 2024 during the last instances of the extradition trial in the British courts, a non-American citizen could be charged under the Espionage Act but not enjoy the safeguards offered by the First Amendment for freedom of speech.

“So, Europeans in Europe must obey US secrecy law, with no defences at all as far as the US government is concerned,” Assange told the audience. He used the expression ‘transnational repression’ to refer to the behaviour of the US. Such behaviour can now be replicated because of the precedent that was set by his conviction.

“Now that one foreign government has formally asserted that Europeans have no free speech rights, the dangerous precedent has been set. Other powerful states will inevitably follow suit. The war in Ukraine has already seen the criminalization of journalists in Russia, but based on the precedent set in my case, there is nothing to stop Russia, or indeed any other state, from targeting European journalists, publishers, or even social media users by claiming that their domestic secrecy laws have been violated.”

Lawfare at all levels

Among the many MPs who participated to the Q&A following Assange’s presentation, Cypriot parliamentarian Constantinos Efstathiou asked a question on how to address all those manipulations of the legal processes through which the application of legislation is turned into a means of repression instead of representing a uniform application of law. The subject led the WikiLeaks’ publisher to mention the relevance of anti-SLAPP legislation.

“There is an anti-SLAPP movement in Europe, which I commend. SLAPP is Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. There is good legislation in California to deal with SLAPP suits and to reverse liabilities at an early stage and make abusive lawsuits more expensive too,” Assange said.

The suggestion was also to look at the bigger picture, understanding that, every time new legislation is made, an occasion is generated for “self-interested bureaucrats, companies, and the worst elements of the security state” to expand the interpretation to achieve control over others. “So, it needs constant vigilance, but also great care in making laws in the first place because they will be seized upon and abused,” Assange pointed out.

Parliamentarians asked the WikiLeaks publisher questions on a selection of issues, from the unresolved problem of unpunished war crimes to dangers in the way Artificial Intelligence and other technologies are regulated.

The session closed with an invitation to go ahead with the civil society effort to protect human rights. “The fundamental liberties which sustain us all have to be fought for. When one of us falls through the cracks, soon enough those cracks will widen and take the rest of us down.”

Answering a question from MP Mladen Bosic, Assange had said that some actors in the civil society realised quickly how threatening his case was for everyone’s fundamental rights. Among these actors, he mentioned lawyers and Human Rights NGOs.

“Allies of the United States, the journalists there, not the lawyers, but the journalists, took longer still. It is a concern,” he said. Here, he took the occasion to point out a crucial issue affecting the effectiveness of the right to inform and being informed. “I can see a similar phenomenon happening with the journalists being killed in Gaza and Ukraine. That the political and geopolitical alignment of media organisations causes them to not cover those victims or cover only certain victims. This is a breach of journalistic solidarity. We all need to stick together to hold the line.”