Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, will soon make his first appearance in public after he was released from a prison in the United Kingdom.
Next week, Assange will speak at a meeting of the Council of Europe, a human rights group. He’s set to provide evidence to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which will meet in Strasbourg.
PACE recently determined in a report that Assange was a political prisoner who had served a “lengthy detention in a high-security prison despite the political nature of the most severe charges against him.”
In late June, the 53-year-old Assange was finally returned back to Australia, his home country, after negotiating a plea deal with the U.S. Department of Justice. That deal saw him plead guilty to one felony count under the Espionage Act, though he also secured his freedom.
The U.S. had wanted Assange in connection for publishing military documents that were classified on his WikiLeaks website.
On Tuesday, assange’s wife, Stella, posted a message on the social media platform X:
“Julian will be in Strasbourg next week on October 1st. It will be an exceptional break from his recovery as @COE invited Julian to provide testimony for the JUR Committee’s report into his case and its wider implications.”
It’s been a long road for Assange, for sure.
The U.S. government initially set its eyes on him in 2010, when he published a series of documents that were leaked to him from former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.
Those documents included diplomatic cables, military logs from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and some footage of an airstrike that the U.S. carried out in Baghdad.
While WikiLeaks won many awards in journalism and publishing for that reporting, a warrant was issued for his arrest by Sweden in November of 2020, which then initiated proceedings to extradite him to the U.S.
While out on bail, Assange left the country and sought refuge in London with the Embassy of Ecuador, and he received asylum from them in August of 2012. That status was withdrawn in April of 2019, though, following multiple disputes with authorities from Ecuador.
UK police were then invited into the Assembly, and Assange was arrested. He was found guilty of skipping bail and was sentenced to spend just less than a year in jail.
In the meantime, the U.S. sought to have him extradited to the U.S. to face serious charges under the Espionage Act. Prosecutors in the case against him argued that he endangered lives by publishing the thousands of documents that were related to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and that he should pay a price because of it.
Assange spent more than five years in a London prison as he was fighting against his extradition to the U.S. through the UK court system.
Ultimately, the plea deal he reached in June of this year saw the entire ordeal come to an end.
