WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is ready to break his self-imposed silence and address the Council of Europe, his organisation revealed Wednesday.
The 53-year-old would travel from his native Australia to Strasbourg in seven days to testify before a parliamentary legal committee investigating his case, AFP reports.
That means he will speak in public for the first time when he gives evidence to the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (Pace).
It comes after a Pace report into his case, which concluded he was a political prisoner and called for Britain to hold an inquiry into whether he had been exposed to inhuman treatment.
Assange spent most of the last 14 years either holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London to avoid arrest or behind bars.
He had been detained at Belmarsh, a security prison in the United Kingdom, since April 2019 after British authorities arrested him in the embassy.
The DOJ had accused Assange of working with former U.S. Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, formerly known as Bradley Manning, in order to steal and disclose classified documents.
He was released from the British prison in June, as Breitbart News reported.
Assange returned to Australia and since then has not publicly commented on his legal woes or his years behind bars.
He has been seen infrequently, appearing at a court in the Marianas Islands, reuniting with his wife on arrival at a Canberra airport and spending time with his family on a quiet beach in Australia.
“Julian Assange is still in recovery following his release from prison,” WikiLeaks said on Wednesday, noting he would attend the Council of Europe “session in person due to the exceptional nature of the invitation”.
The Council of Europe is an international organisation that brings together the 46 signatory states of the European Convention on Human Rights, with little say over Assange’s legal fate.
Some legal experts believe Assange’s appearance could put his bid for a U.S. presidential pardon at risk.
“He’ll inevitably be critical of the US government on some level and I can’t see that as something that is going to be considered helpful,” Holly Cullen, a law professor at the University of Western Australia, told AFP.
“Even if he personally thinks that he doesn’t care, his legal advisers would say ‘maybe you need to be a bit more restrained until the pardon issue is resolved’.”
AFP contributed to this story