Julian Assange shocked the world in 2010 after WikiLeaks, which he founded, uploaded online video footage and documents of US war crimes, including indiscriminately killing Reuters journalists and other civilians in Baghdad during the American occupation of Iraq.

Few, however, expected the US administration to go after Assange so hard, forcing him into a 12-year ordeal of seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in June 2012 and then being arrested and thrown into the Belmarsh prison in London in April 2019.

Assange was released on the basis of a plea deal in June this year.

I have been writing about Assange since 2010, including about the demonstrations in the US demanding the release of Chelsea Manning, then known as Bradley Manning, a US army intelligence analyst who leaked the documents to WikiLeaks.

It's good to see both of them free now. In particular it was exciting to finally see Assange in person at a hearing at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg on Oct 1, his first public event since his release from prison.

Assange was inspiring as usual when he told the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that: "I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism. I plead guilty to seeking information from a source. I plead guilty to obtaining information from source. And I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was."

His words drew loud applause not just from PACE members, but also the journalists covering the hearing, something unusual for reporters and photographers doing their work.

Assange shows strong signs of being tortured in prison. His wife Stella appeared tormented, saying Assange continues to suffer the effects of very prolonged and extreme torture and for being forced to live in harsh conditions for years. But she didn't go into the details to safeguard his privacy.

On Oct 2, PACE recognized Assange as a "political prisoner" and warned against the chilling effects of his harsh treatment.

When I asked Thorhildur Sunna Aevarsdottir, the PACE rapporteur in the Assange case, if she was disappointed with most of the European leaders for not seeking the release of Assange, her answer was blunt. She said it has a lot to do with who was pursuing Assange and trying to put him in jail for 175 years, adding that it's more difficult for politicians to speak up when their allies violate human rights.

The hypocrisy of many Western leaders and the double standard they resort to stands exposed.

Over the past weeks, many Western leaders, from US President Joe Biden to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, have condemned Iran's retaliatory attacks against Israel and marked the one-year anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel on Oct 7. But they have never condemned Israel for assassinating senior Iranian officials and killing more than 42,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, in the Gaza Strip.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres rightly said after the Oct 7, 2023, Hamas attacks that they "did not happen in a vacuum" because "the Palestinian people have been subjected to years of suffocating occupation".

Most Western leaders, who like to proclaim themselves to be representatives of the international community, have refused to see the whole picture and find the root cause of the conflicts in many parts of the world. Also, they accuse anyone exposing or challenging their double standard of spreading "disinformation".

Western countries and news media have had outsized influence in the global system. But as Assange told the audience in Strasbourg, people should do their part to ensure the voices of the majority are not silenced.

From Assange to Gaza, many Western leaders and mainstream media have stubbornly chosen to be on the wrong side of history for the interests of a few.

The author is chief of China Daily EU Bureau based in Brussels.

chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn