STORY: :: Julian Assange says he chose freedom over justice in his first public comments after release from detention
:: October 1, 2024
:: Julian Assange, Wikileaks founder
:: Strasbourg, France
:: "I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice after being detained for years and facing a 175-year sentence with no effective remedy. Justice for me is now precluded as the U.S. government insisted on writing into its plea agreement that I cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a Freedom of Information Act request over what it did to me as a result of its extradition request. I want to be totally clear: 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. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source and I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else. I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weaknesses of the existing safeguards and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable."
Assange, 53, returned to his home country Australia in June after a deal was struck for his release which saw him plead guilty to violating U.S. espionage law, ending a 14-year British legal odyssey.
WikiLeaks in 2010 released hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. military documents on Washington's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq - the largest security breaches of their kind in U.S. military history - along with swaths of diplomatic cables. Assange was indicted years later under the Espionage Act.
