Keeping track of the multitude of institutions within the European Union has never been an easy task. Occasionally, one of them produces news worth reporting. And sometimes that news promises to have long-lasting implications. Even though largely ignored by Western media, last week’s episode in which Australian journalist and founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, testified before the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) can be counted as especially momentous.

PACE is a key institution within the Council of Europe, the platform for cooperation and dialogue among Europe’s 27 nations. PACE focuses on promoting human rights, democracy and the rule of law across Europe. These are topics of universal interest one might expect United States news media and especially the US government, who spent so much time and money seeking Assange’s extradition, to be keenly interested in. But the story got little coverage in the West and practically none in the US. The last time The New York Times even mentioned PACE was over a year ago, in September 2023, in an article with the title: “In occupied areas of Ukraine, Russia is holding local elections that have been widely denounced.”

PACE not only monitors the implementation of Council of Europe conventions and agreements between member states, it also elects judges to the European Court of Human Rights. You would be justified in thinking of it as the “conscience” of Europe. Its role in human rights advocacy empowers it to adopt resolutions and make recommendations to improve human rights protection. In that capacity, following Assange’s testimony, PACE “expressed deep concern at ‘the disproportionately harsh treatment’ faced by Julian Assange and said this has had a ‘dangerous chilling effect’ which undermines the protection of journalists and whistleblowers around the world.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Disproportionately harsh treatment:

The US administration’s chosen strategy for dealing with anything or anyone that in any way threatens or even criticizes its actions abroad.

Contextual note

Assange’s legal saga began in 2010, four months after the publication of classified documents on the war in Iraq. It lasted until June 26, 2024 when Assange entered into a guilty plea agreement with the US justice system.

In the opening act, the Australian journalist and founder of WikiLeaks was charged with a sexual offense in Sweden. The case was closed in 2017, as the evidence required for a conviction had not been gathered. Simultaneously, the US Justice Department initiated an investigation using the pretext of the 1917 Espionage Act, a tool that the administration of former President Barack Obama became fond of using against whistleblowers. Fearing extradition to the US, the Ecuadorian embassy granted Assange asylum in London, where he remained for seven years. Then on April 11, 2019, he was forcibly handed over to the British authorities after the election of a new Ecuadorian president, whom WikiLeaks had accused of corruption.

The denouement came after Assange had spent five years in a high-security Belmarsh prison in the UK. It is still unclear why Washington agreed to his release. It should however be obvious that the administration of current President Joe Biden — used to benefiting from European indulgence, if not solidarity with even the harshest of US foreign policy positions — was not expecting the conclusions reached by PACE following Assange’s testimony earlier this month. The Parliamentary Assembly pulled no punches as it reached a conclusion with potentially deep implications for the behavior of all self-respecting democracies, especially those that like to lecture other nations about human rights, freedom of expression and the need to respect a rules-based order.

PACE noted explicitly that Assange’s treatment has had a dangerous deterrent effect on journalists and whistleblowers worldwide. “Chilling” is the term it chose. For the sake of the future of democracy, it becomes urgent to ask ourselves on both sides of the Atlantic: After the Assange case, will journalists and whistleblowers be better protected? On the basis of this judgment, we should hope so, but at the same time we must ask ourselves: Are the politicians in the US and in Europe even listening?

PACE specifically called on the US to go beyond its concern for the protection of journalists by actively combating the tradition of impunity for state agents guilty of war crimes. Will this call be heeded? In the context of ongoing conflicts today in which the US has become implicated, and at a moment when a democratic US presidential candidate openly embraces and celebrates the “service” of former Vice President Dick Cheney, there is reason to doubt it.

Historical note

This episode underlines the perception most people have today that we are living through a period of rapid historical transition. The question of the survival of democracy appears to be on everyone’s mind. We easily understand that democracy can never be perfect, but now that it appears threatened from various sides, can we even find the means to preserve it? Should we consider whistleblowers like Assange and Edward Snowden servants of a citizenry focused on the integrity of governance or dangerous enemies of a system that must be protected not just from physical assault but from critical assessment of any kind?

At a time when the fight for information control has been in the headlines with new pressures on Telegram and Twitter, we should see PACE’s resolution as a strong signal of encouragement to journalists and whistleblowers and a warning to governments easily tempted to justify or paper over the most extreme acts of their militaries and allies in times of war. European governments should be the first to take its recommendations on board. Journalism is already threatened in its theoretical independence by the domination of the economic interests that control or influence the media. If the wheels of justice can be manipulated to suppress truth-telling, democracy cannot survive.

PACE looks beyond Europe and its media. It specifically addresses the US, a nation that has persistently and assiduously put Assange through more than a decade of confinement and even torture. That he is now free to circulate and speak publicly is something of a victory, but it is a victory in a battle that should never have taken place in a democratic society. The atrocities revealed by Assange in his WikiLeaks must not be hidden from the public in the name of a nation’s raison d’Etat.

If PACE’s resolution has any real impact, it means that a clarified legal context will make it more difficult for governments to gag the media and allow crimes committed by their agents to go unpunished. In 2010, WikiLeaks published incontrovertible evidence of atrocities committed by American and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Governments and armies will always attempt to conceal acts they find embarrassing. But the press must be allowed to uncover them and publish the truth, with no fear of legal repercussions for doing so.

In recent times, European institutions have been the object of justified and unjustified criticism. Europe today suffers materially and psychologically from its ambiguous relationship with the most powerful member of the Atlantic Alliance. Defining Europe’s “strategic autonomy” is an ongoing challenge. The Council of Europe is once again proving itself to be a major institution for the protection of human rights. In 2005, this same Council mandated the late Dick Marty to investigate the CIA’s secret prisons in Europe. In 2015 and 2016, the European Court of Human Rights condemned Poland, Lithuania and Romania for housing such detention centers.

The governments called into question by such actions will always react defensively to such initiatives. They are rarely “brought to justice” in the sense of holding individuals and institutions legally and formally responsible for identified crimes and atrocities and subject to punishment under the law. But such resolutions help to set standards that will reduce the amount of abuse meted out to independent voices seeking to keep the public informed.

Assange is a journalist whose career was interrupted at the height of his powers and his potential contribution to society and democracy effectively silenced. In Gaza and Lebanon today we are seeing other cases of “disproportionately harsh treatment” that for some political leaders appears to be their privileged form of governance, if not a way of life. Even “proportional” harsh treatment needs to be used as sparingly as possible. As a society, we need to bring the taste for disproportionality under control. For some, it appears to be an addiction.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.