STRASBOURG: Wikileaks founder Julian Assange said on Tuesday he was released after years of incarceration only because he pleaded guilty to doing "journalism", warning freedom of expression was now at a "dark crossroads."

"I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I pleaded guilty to journalism," Assange said.

He was addressing the Council of Europe rights body at its Strasbourg headquarters in his first public comments since his release.

The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) had issued a report expressing alarm at Assange's treatment, saying it had a "chilling effect on human rights".

Assange spent most of the last 14 years either holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London to avoid arrest, or locked up at Belmarsh Prison.

He was released under a plea bargain in June, after serving a sentence for publishing hundreds of thousands of confidential United States government documents.

The trove included searingly frank US State Department descriptions of foreign leaders, accounts of extrajudicial killings and intelligence gathering against allies.

Assange returned to Australia and since then had not publicly commented on his legal woes or his years behind bars.

Facing a potential 175-year sentence, "I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice… Justice for me is now precluded," Assange said, referring to the conditions of his plea bargain.

Speaking calmly and flanked by his wife Stella, who fought for his release, he added: "Journalism is not a crime, it is a pillar of a free and informed society."

"Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroads," he told the hearing of the PACE legal committee.

"Let us all commit to doing our part to ensure the light of freedom never dims and the pursuit of truth will live on and the voices of many are not silenced by the interests of the few." AFP

  - AFP