Julian Assange spoke for the first time since his release from prison in an address to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in France.
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00:00I eventually chose freedom over unrealizable justice after being detained for years and
00:12facing a 175 year sentence with no effective remedy.
00:19Justice for me is now precluded as the US government insisted in writing into its plea
00:26agreement that I cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a Freedom
00:33of Information Act request over what it did to me as a result of its expedition request.
00:40I want to be totally clear.
00:43I am not free today because the system worked.
00:47I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism.
00:54I pled guilty to seeking information from a source.
00:58I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source.
01:03And I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was.
01:11I did not plead guilty to anything else.
01:14I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weaknesses of the existing safeguards
01:23and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable.
01:29As I emerge from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible and I
01:36regret how much ground has been lost during that time period.
01:43How expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened and diminished.
01:49I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self-censorship.
02:00It is hard not to draw a line from the U.S. government's prosecution of me, its crossing
02:08the Rubicon by internationally criminalizing journalism, to the chilled climate for freedom
02:15of expression that exists now.
02:22When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream, to educate people about how
02:27the world works so that, through understanding, we might bring about something better.
02:34Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go.
02:42Knowledge empowers us to hold power to account and to demand justice where there is none.
02:49We obtained and published truths about tens of thousands of hidden casualties of war and
02:55other unseen horrors, about programs of assassination, rendition, torture and mass surveillance.
03:03We revealed not just when and where these things happened, but frequently the policies,
03:09the agreements and the structures behind them.
03:13When we published Collateral Murder, the infamous gun camera footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter
03:19crew eagerly blowing to pieces Iraqi journalists and their rescuers, the visual reality of
03:26modern warfare shocked the world.
03:28But we also used interest in this video to direct people to the classified policies for
03:35when the U.S. military could deploy lethal force in Iraq and how many civilians could
03:41be killed before gaining higher approval.
03:44In fact, 40 years of my potential 175 year sentence was for obtaining and releasing those policies.