Davide Del Vecchio said that the recently launched African news leaking service AfriLeaks is not affected by WikiLeaks example because it represents a wide network of news organizations.

WASHINGTON, January 14 (Sputnik) – The recently launched African news leaking service AfriLeaks is not affected by WikiLeaks example because it represents a wide network of news organizations, the platform developer Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights co-founder Davide Del Vecchio told Sputnik on Wednesday.

“The organization [AfriLeaks] is an alliance of the most important African investigative journalists, they will not just publish anonymously the received information but perform deep investigations before exposing the truth,” he explained. When asked if AfriLeaks organizers are afraid of WikiLeaks founder’s fate, Del Vecchio said, “No, because behind AfriLeaks there are hundreds of professional investigative journalists.”

Since June 2012, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has taken refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London, when the British court ruled to extradite him to Sweden on charges of alleged sexual assault. Assange claimed the extradition to Sweden was a ploy to hand him over to the United States, where he would be charged for publishing classified information.

Del Vecchio added that WikiLeaks and AfriLeaks are “completely different.”

The Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights co-founder said that AfriLeaks is based on GlobaLeaks software that they had developed “with the best security standards and technologies.”

“We did support and helped the African Network of Centers for Investigative Reporting to create and launch AfriLeaks even if we at Hermes Center do not manage the AfriLeaks platform,” Del Vecchio said.

The co-founder stressed that now is a good moment to launch AfriLeaks “since the awareness about transparency and whistleblowing is very high and at the same time the African area was completely missing a website to leak confidential documents of public interest.”

“We do hope in the next future to see 10, 100 and 1000 initiatives like AfriLeaks,” Del Vecchio concluded.

The freedom of press is often questioned in the African continent with the three African countries, Sudan, Eritrea, and Somalia, being at the bottom ten of the 2014 World Press Freedom Index, each having deteriorated from the previous year.