The Council of Europe will hear WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange tomorrow

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is expected in Strasbourg tomorrow "to testify before the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe", according to an announcement published last week by WikiLeaks on a social network, an announcement cited by France Soir publication. The hearing was scheduled following the publication of an investigative report by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe into the implications of Julian Assange's years of detention and its wider effects on human rights, particularly freedom of journalism.

That report would, according to the agenda, be debated in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, which will take place on Wednesday, October 2, and in the conclusions of the document it is shown that Assange was politically imprisoned and appeals to the UK authorities to allow an independent investigation into whether the WikiLeaks founder was subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment during his detention.

Tomorrow's hearing before the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee will be Assange's "first official testimony" since his arrest by British police in April 2019 after seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden in a rape investigation, dismissed the same year. Assange was detained for five years in the high-security prison in Belmarsh (east London), fighting against the extradition request submitted by the US, where he is accused of violating the espionage law.

We remind you that in 2010, Julian Assange published on the WikiLeaks platform over 700,000 documents related to Washington's military and diplomatic activities, especially in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which he was cataloged at the time as a champion of freedom of information. A plea deal with US justice eventually allowed him, at the end of June 2024, to leave the UK and go to Saipan, a US territory in the Pacific, where a judge sentenced him to a prison term that covers his provisional detention. Assange was then released and returned to Australia. Since then, Assange has not made a public statement, with his wife saying she needs privacy and time to recover.