‘I chose freedom over justice’: Julian Assange in first address since prison release

Australian Community Media

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.

Transcript

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.

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