Julian Assange to make first public appearance since his release

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is set to make his first public appearance since being freed from a U.K. prison, his organization said in a statement on Tuesday. 

Assange will be addressing the human rights organization Council of Europe next week. He will be providing evidence on Oct. 1 to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) in Strasbourg. The appearance comes as PACE determined in a recently released report that he was a political prisoner and that he served a “lengthy detention in a high-security prison despite the political nature of the most severe charges against him”.

The WikiLeaks founder, 53, returned to his home country of Australia after striking a plea deal with Justice Department (DOJ) officials to secure his freedom. He pleaded guilty to one felony count in late June under the Espionage Act for his role in publishing classified military documents. 

“Julian will be in Strasbourg next week on October 1st. It will be an exceptional break from his recovery as @COE invited Julian to provide testimony for the JUR Committee’s report into his case and its wider implications,” his wife, Stella Assange, said in a Tuesday post on X. 

Assange entered the plea deal in court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands. He was held in Belmarsh high-security prison since 2019, following his removal from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. 

He was accused of assisting U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning in stealing military documents and diplomatic cables so that WikiLeaks could publish them online. Prosecutors argued that the thousands of documents regarding the Afghanistan and Iraq wars that were published endangered lives.