Assange To Testify On Political Imprisonment For Engaging In Journalism

It will be Assange's first public testimony since he was arrested and expelled from Ecuador’s London embassy in 2019.

Creative commons-licensed photo of Palace of Europe, where the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly meets. Julian Assange family photo.

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WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will travel to Strasbourg, France, and testify before the Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights on October 1. It will be his first public testimony since he was arrested and expelled from Ecuador’s London embassy in 2019. 

The committee is part of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, an international body that is made up of parliamentarians from each European Union member state. Assange will contribute testimony on the political nature of the United States government’s prosecution against him, which ended in a plea agreement in June. 

Consideration of Assange’s political imprisonment is part of a wider examination by the assembly of the increased threats to journalists and whistleblowers in Europe, and it was initiated while Assange was still detained at Belmarsh.

On May 13 and 14, Ævarsdóttir traveled to the United Kingdom to visit Assange in His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. She talked with Assange for two hours and also met with his wife Stella Assange, his solicitor Gareth Peirce, David Morris, who is the chair of the U.K. delegation to the assembly, and Jeremy Corbyn, a member of the assembly. She met with several former UN officials, lawyers, journalists, psychiatrists, human rights defenders, and civil society representatives, too. 

Even though the U.K. Home Office was the office that approved the extradition request against Assange, the office declined to make a representative available for a meeting with Ævarsdóttir. 

Þórhildur Sunna Ævarsdóttir, the general rapporteur for political prisoners and an Icelandic parliamentarian who serves on the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights, compiled a report on Assange. It concluded that he meets the assembly’s definition of a political prisoner.

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