Wikileaks founder Julian Assange will make his first public statement since his release from prison in June, addressing the Council of Europe in Strasbourg next week.
Assange, 53, will testify to the legal and human rights committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) on Tuesday, Wikileaks said in a statement.
The testimony will come after the parliamentary assembly publishes an investigation report into Assange’s five-year detention in Belmarsh prison. He previously spent seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London after claiming asylum.
In a statement, Wikileaks said the following:
“The report confirms that Assange qualifies as a political prisoner and calls on the UK conduct an independent review into whether he was exposed to inhuman or degrading treatment. The report discusses how governments employ both legal and extralegal measures to suppress dissent across borders, which poses significant threats to press freedom and human rights.”
Wikileaks said Mr. Assange was “on the mend,” having returned to his native Australia following his release. Meanwhile, his wife Stella said he needed time to “regain his freedom” and recover before speaking publicly at a “convenient time.”
A statement published on X’s website said he would attend the hearing in France “due to the exceptional nature of the invitation and to accept the support received from PACE and its delegates.”
Assange’s release in June followed an appearance before a judge in the US territory of the Northern Mariana Islands in the Pacific Ocean, where he pleaded guilty to a single charge after the US dropped 17 other espionage charges against him.
Origins of Wikileaks
Julian Assange had been programming since the age of 16 and soon took up hacking under the nickname Mendax. He later formed the hacking group “International Subversives” with friends.
Assange was suspected of crimes such as infiltrating the databases of the Department of Defence and other US agencies. In 1991, an investigation was launched against the hacker on suspicion of breaking into the server of the Canadian telecommunications company Nortel Networks. The investigation lasted several years. In 1996, Julian Assange pleaded guilty to most of the 31 charges, but was sentenced only to a fine of about $1,300.
He later worked as a computer security consultant and changed several professions in the information technology field. In 1998, Assange co-founded Earthmen Technology, an Australian company developing network intrusion detection technologies.
In 2006, he and like-minded individuals created the WikiLeaks website, which made publicly available classified information obtained from anonymous sources. The first document was published in December 2006.
Mr. Assange gained international fame after a video of the shooting of a group of civilians in Baghdad by two US Apache helicopters in 2007 was posted on the WikiLeaks website in 2010. Two Reuters reporters were among the dead. The site later published thousands of files with classified information related to the US military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq and correspondence of US diplomats. The documents were distributed by the world’s leading media outlets.
