BRUSSELS -- The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange said on Tuesday that he was freed after years of incarceration because he had chosen "freedom over unrealizable justice", as he described his plea deal with US authorities.

In his first public comments since he was released from custody after a 14-year legal saga with his plea deal with the United States, Assange told a hearing in Strasbourg, France, organized by the legal affairs and human rights committee of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, that he had "pled guilty to journalism."

"I am not free today because the system worked," Assange told the committee. "I am free today after years of incarceration because I pled guilty to journalism." "Journalism is not a crime, it is a pillar of a free and informed society," he said.

Tuesday's event was held ahead of a full plenary debate on the subject by the Parliamentary Assembly on Wednesday.

In June this year, Assange pleaded guilty to a single felony count of violating the Espionage Act, allowing him to return to his country Australia without serving additional prison time in the United States. He admitted to "unlawfully obtaining and disseminating classified information relating to the national defense" in a federal court in Saipan, the capital of the Northern Mariana Islands.

Just a few months after his release, Assange gave evidence of the impact of his detention and conviction to the committee.

Assange's lengthy legal battle with the US government began in 2010, when WikiLeaks published hundreds of thousands of classified US military documents regarding the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which included an Apache helicopter video footage documenting the US military gunning down Reuters journalists and children in Baghdad's streets in 2007.