WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange said today that he was freed after five years of incarceration because he had “pleaded guilty to journalism.”

Mr Assange, making his first public remarks since his release from Belmarsh prison in south-east London, gave evidence of the impact of his detention and conviction to the legal affairs and human rights committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, France. 

He was freed in June after pleading guilty to obtaining and publishing US military secrets in a deal with US Justice Department prosecutors. 

Before being jailed, Mr Assange had spent seven years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he claimed asylum on the grounds of political persecution.

He said. “I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism.

“I pled guilty to seeking information from a source. I pled guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I pled guilty to informing the public what that information was.”

The transition from years of confinement in a maximum security prison to addressing the European parliamentarians was a “profound and a surreal shift,” Mr Assange said as he detailed his experience of spending years in isolation in a small cell.

“It strips away one’s sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence,” he said, his voice cracking while he offered an apology for his “faltering words” and an “unpolished presentation.”

The Australian journalist said that he was not yet ready “to speak about what I have endured — the relentless struggle to stay alive, both physically and mentally.”

Mr Assange was accused of receiving and publishing hundreds of thousands of war logs and diplomatic cables that included details of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

Among the files published by WikiLeaks was a video of a 2007 attack by a US Apache helicopter in Baghdad that killed 11 people, including two Reuters journalists.