WikiLeaks founder makes first public appearance since release

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will appear in public for the first time since his release from a British prison. As his organization announced, Assange will appear before the Council of Europe next week and testify before the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights. The committee had been dealing with the case.

“Julian Assange is still recovering from his release from prison,” Wikileaks said. “Due to the exceptional nature of the invitation,” the founder of the organization will personally attend the meeting. It will be “Assange’s first official statement on his case since before his imprisonment in 2019,” Wikileaks said.

According to the meeting calendar, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe will consider Assange’s case on October 2. Since Russia’s exclusion, 46 countries have been members of the Council of Europe. The organization is not affiliated with the EU.

How did Assange’s release come about?

Assange was accused of war in the USA, and from 2010 onwards around 700,000 confidential documents about US military and diplomatic activities were published. The papers contained explosive information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the killing of civilians and the mistreatment of prisoners by US military personnel.

The Wikileaks founder returned to his home country Australia at the end of June after a total of twelve years in embassy asylum and prison in Great Britain. The Australian had pleaded guilty to conspiracy to pass on information for national defense purposes as part of an agreement with the US judiciary. He was therefore formally sentenced to five years and two months in prison. This sentence had already been served by his five-year sentence in the British Belmarsh prison. Before his imprisonment, Assange had found asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for seven years.