As the world teeters on the verge of a massive war in the Middle East that could turn into World War Three, it is hard to even notice other important events.

What seems to overshadow everything else is the hideous spectacle of Israel and the collective West co-perpetrating a genocide in Gaza while also producing multiple attacks and massacres in the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran, as well as issuing ceaseless threats to do even worse if the victims dare fight back. When Gaza is being exterminated and Beirut is burning, why would people turn to look, for instance, at sleepy Strasbourg?

And yet, on October 1, that’s where a quietly historic event took place, namely the first major public appearance of Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, publisher, and outstanding investigative journalist, after his release in June from some 14 years of vicious American-British persecution and incarceration, some of which, according to UN special rapporteur Nils Melzer and the prestigious medical journal The Lancet, amounts to torture.

Though he is now free, Assange has not, it is important to note, received justice and most likely never will: A victim of outrageous abuses of state power, the crimes against him have not even been acknowledged by their perpetrators. Instead, to escape further persecution he was forced through a plea deal to pretend to recognize his own non-existent guilt. As he put it in Strasbourg – clearly with ironic reference to the title of a famous Soviet dissident’s memoir – he “chose freedom over unrealizable justice.”

Justice for him “is now precluded” in the future, too, because Washington has written into the plea deal that he “cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a freedom of information act request” in the US. So much, again, for the rule of law in the “rules-based order”: Perverted to the last moment and beyond. This extremely murky outcome also means, again in Assange’s own words, that he is “not free today because the system worked,” but because he pleaded guilty to, in effect, journalism, which is, of course, simply not a crime.

The occasion for Assange’s statement and short Q&A session in Strasbourg was a deceptively small-scale hearing at the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE, a 46-nation organization not to be confused with the EU). Organized by PACE’s........

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