In a pivotal development for WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the High Court in London granted him the opportunity on Tuesday to continue his legal battle against extradition to the United States. The decision comes amid ongoing international scrutiny over the implications of Assange's potential trial in the US.
Assange, 52, has been embroiled in a legal saga for years, with US prosecutors seeking his extradition to face 18 charges, primarily related to espionage. However, the High Court ruled that the US must provide "satisfactory assurances" regarding Assange's rights, including the ability to invoke the First Amendment and clarity on whether he could face the death penalty if convicted. The latest ruling stems from Assange's legal team's efforts in February to challenge Britain's approval of his extradition to the US, arguing that his prosecution was politically motivated. In a significant turn, two senior judges acknowledged Assange's realistic prospect of successfully challenging extradition on multiple grounds, setting the stage for a prolonged legal battle. While the US has accused Assange of "indiscriminately and knowingly" publishing the names of sources, rather than merely expressing his political views, his defense team has vehemently contested these allegations. Assange's case has drawn widespread attention from human rights advocates, free speech proponents, and legal experts, who argue that his extradition could set a dangerous precedent for journalistic freedom and whistleblowing. As the legal proceedings unfold, Assange remains confined in the high-security Belmarsh prison in London, where he has spent years fighting extradition and facing numerous legal challenges. The decision by the High Court to allow Assange to continue his appeal underscores the complex legal and ethical dilemmas surrounding his case, with implications that extend far beyond his individual fate.
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The US Justice Department is considering whether to allow WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to plead guilty to a misdemeanour offense in order to avoid extradition to the US on espionage charges, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
The potential deal would see Assange plead guilty to mishandling classified information, with the five years he has already served in London’s Belmarsh Prison counting as his sentence, the unnamed sources told the newspaper. Assange’s lawyers and US officials have held preliminary talks in recent months to sketch out a possible bargain, the sources said. However, Barry Pollack, a lawyer for the jailed journalist, told the newspaper that “there are no signs” that the department is ready to accept the deal. If a deal were reached, it would end a legal battle in play for more than a decade. After his arrest by British police in 2010 for sexual offense allegations that he denied, Assange jumped bail in 2012 and was granted asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. He was arrested again in 2019 when Ecuador revoked his asylum, and has remained in Belmarsh ever since. The Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Assange on the day of his arrest, charging him with 17 counts of espionage. If extradited to the US and convicted, the former WikiLeaks boss faces up to 175 years in prison. The charges stem from his publication of classified material obtained by whistle-blowers, including Pentagon documents detailing alleged US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. The UK Home Office approved his transfer to American custody in 2022, but Assange – now in poor health after nearly five years of solitary confinement – has filed repeated appeals, none of which have been successful. Last month, Britain’s High Court postponed a decision on granting Assange a final chance to appeal his extradition. Washington’s use of the Espionage Act to prosecute Assange is controversial, as the Australian-born journalist published, but did not steal, the classified material in question. Former US President Barack Obama refused to press charges against Assange for this very reason, arguing that his activity was no different from that of any newspaper, and was therefore protected by the First Amendment of the US Constitution. With an election coming up this November, US President Joe Biden is keen to avoid the “political hot potato” of an extradited journalist arriving in Washington to face criminal prosecution, the Wall Street Journal wrote. Furthermore, American “prosecutors face diminishing odds that he would serve much more time even if he were convicted stateside,” the paper noted. It is not a secret that Julian Assange can divide opinion. But now is a time to put all such issues firmly to one side. Now is a time to stand by Mr Assange, and to do so on principle, for the sake of his freedom – and ours.
There can be no divide over the attempt by the United States to have the WikiLeaks founder extradited from Britain to face charges under the US Espionage Act, which reaches a critical stage in London this week. The application embodies not just a threat to Mr Assange personally. It is also, as this newspaper has consistently argued over many years, an iniquitous threat to journalism, with global implications. It poses the most fundamental of questions about free speech. On these grounds alone, Mr Assange’s extradition should be unhesitatingly opposed. In 2010, WikiLeaks published revelatory US government documents exposing diplomatic and military policy in the Afghan and Iraq wars. Four years ago, during the Trump presidency, the US justice department issued a WikiLeaks-related indictment of 18 counts against Mr Assange. It charged him with multiple breaches of the 1917 Espionage Act, a statute that originally clamped down on opposition to America’s entry into the first world war. In recent years, though, the act has mainly been invoked against leakers. Earlier targets included the Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, who passed documents to the New York Times exposing US government lies about the Vietnam war. Those charges were eventually dismissed, but it was a close-run thing. The Espionage Act contains no public interest defence. A person charged under it cannot present evidence about the content of the material leaked, cannot say why they did what they did and cannot argue that the public had a right to know about the issues. Those restrictions are no more acceptable in Mr Assange’s case than in Mr Ellsberg’s time. The free press still matters. Journalists sometimes depend on whistle blowers. The relationship between them is particularly delicate and important in cases where national security is invoked. When the unequalled global power of the US is involved, the stakes are especially large. But even national security, and certainly the national security of a global superpower, cannot in every single circumstance invariably override the public interest in publication and the right to know. That was the core issue in the Ellsberg case, as it also was in the WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden cases. In Espionage Act prosecutions, however, that public interest argument is always muzzled. This week, Mr Assange’s lawyers will seek leave to appeal against the extradition decision made in 2022 by the then home secretary Priti Patel. If he is extradited, and unless the UK relents or President Biden intervenes, he faces a criminal trial in which his arguments will be silenced, and a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison for each of the Espionage Act charges. If convicted, he could be locked away for his lifetime. The implications for journalism are every bit as serious. This newspaper’s journalism, and that of potentially every newspaper based in the US or an allied country, would be at risk too. If the prosecution succeeds, the New York Times lawyer in the Pentagon Papers case has said, “investigative reporting based on classified information will be given a near death blow”. That prospect is on the line in the courts this week. A society that claims to uphold freedom of the press cannot possibly remain indifferent. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will be granted honorary citizenship of Rome, city councilor Antonella Melito said on Tuesday. She added that the process will be completed after all the necessary paperwork has been done.
Assange, 52, has been incarcerated at the high-security Belmarsh Prison in London since 2019 as he fights extradition to the US, where he could face a life sentence over the 2010 release of highly sensitive US Army intelligence information related to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to Melito, by granting Assange citizenship, Rome intends to send a message of “solidarity and support to all those who are unjustly detained and convicted in violation of their fundamental rights.” The motion to confer honorary citizenship on the Australian activist was presented by a former mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi. On Wednesday, Raggi posted on social media that “an important step was taken in the protection of Julian Assange, as a person and as a symbol.” She added that the Wikileaks founder’s case shows that “freedom of the press must always be defended.” In June, Assange’s wife Stella visited the Vatican and met with Pope Francis. Later, in an interview with the Catholic Herald magazine, she said that Francis had sent a letter to her husband in March 2021, which was a “significant event” at a particularly low point for him. At the time, a lower court in Britain had ruled that Assange’s treatment in the US “would not be humane,” but decided not to grant him bail. Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in August that he was frustrated by the lack of a diplomatic solution to end Assange’s detention. He said he would continue to press the US to cease its prosecution of the WikiLeaks founder, despite US Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejecting all previous pleas from Canberra to ensure his wellbeing. “This has gone on for too long. Enough is enough,” Albanese told reporters at the time. “We remain very firm in our view and in our representations to the American government and we will continue to do so.” Imagine, for a moment, that the government of Cuba was demanding the extradition of an Australian publisher in the United Kingdom for exposing Cuban military crimes. Imagine that these crimes had included a 2007 massacre by helicopter-borne Cuban soldiers of a dozen Iraqi civilians, among them two journalists for the Reuters news agency.
Now imagine that, if extradited from the UK to Cuba, the Australian publisher would face up to 175 years in a maximum-security prison, simply for having done what media professionals are ostensibly supposed to do: report reality. Finally, imagine the reaction of the United States to such Cuban conduct, which would invariably consist of impassioned squawking about human rights and democracy and a call for the universal vilification of Cuba. Of course, it doesn’t take a stretch of the imagination to deduce that the above scenario is a rearranged version of true events, and that the publisher in question is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The antagonising nation is not Cuba but rather the US itself, which is responsible for not only the obliteration of Assange’s individual human rights but also a stunning array of far more macro-level assaults on people across the world. As per the US narrative, Assange’s WikiLeaks endeavours endangered the lives of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere – although it would seem like one surefire way to not endanger lives in such places would be to not blow them up in the first place. It is furthermore perplexing that a nation for which military slaughter is an institutionalised pastime should make such a selective stink about the exposure of certain gory details. Granted, footage of defenceless civilians being picked off at close range like videogame targets by a laughing helicopter crew does little to uphold Americans’ projected role as the “good guys” – a façade that is key in terms of justifying the country’s self-presumed right to wreak international havoc as it pleases. Had Assange wanted to save his own skin, he could have stuck to the sort of imperial propaganda that functions as mainstream journalism, a field that was itself instrumental in selling the wars on Afghanistan and Iraq to the US public. Instead, he is incarcerated at Belmarsh prison in southeast London, awaiting extradition to the so-called “land of the free” while serving as a veritable case study in prolonged psychological torture, as documented back in 2019 by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture. In a caustic letter addressed to King Charles ahead of his recent coronation, Assange described himself as a “political prisoner, held at your majesty’s pleasure on behalf of an embarrassed foreign sovereign”. He observed: “One can truly know the measure of a society by how it treats its prisoners, and your kingdom has surely excelled in that regard”. The embarrassed foreign sovereign has certainly exhibited excellence in that realm, as well, boasting the highest incarceration rate on the planet and an impressive track record of executing innocent people. To be sure, domestic efforts to sentence a citizen of another country to 175 years in prison for telling the truth is also a pretty good indication that something is very, very wrong with a society. Then there’s the whole matter of the United States’ offshore penal colony in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the former CIA torture den and persistent judicial black hole into which the US has sought to disappear some of the human fallout of its forever wars. Indeed, the fact the US feels entitled to call out the Cuban government for its own “political prisoners” while operating an illegal prison on occupied Cuban territory can be safely filed under the category of mind-blowingly sinister hypocrisy. If only there were more journalists who wanted to talk about such things. But just like you can’t cover up the crimes of Guantánamo by classifying prisoners’ artwork, you can’t hide the horrors of US policy by effectively redacting Julian Assange out of existence. It’s the old kill-the-messenger approach – in which the “killing” takes the form of long-drawn-out psychological erosion conducted in tandem with a campaign to normalise the idea that Assange should be behind bars for eternity-plus. In the end, the assault on Assange is not just your average disproportionate imperial conniption fit. Whatever the ultimate outcome, it has already set a perilous precedent in criminalising not only freedom of speech and the press but also – if you think about it – freedom of thought. Although Australian officials are making increasing noise agitating for Assange’s release, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has refused to say whether he will address the issue with US President Joe Biden at the Quad Leaders’ Summit in Sydney on May 24. And as the forever wars of the US rage on increasingly out of sight, so, too, does the forever war on Julian Assange. A post on Presskit Facebook page announces that Julian Assange’s defence has filed an appeal against the UK to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) to prevent his extradition to the US, which was authorised in June by then British Home Secretary Priti Patel. An ECHR ruling could order the extradition to be blocked.
Assange, 51, is wanted by U.S. authorities on 18 counts, including one under a spying act, relating to WikiLeaks' release of vast troves of confidential U.S. military records and diplomatic cables which Washington said had put lives in danger. LONDON, May 31 -- The reports stating that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was subjected to psychological torture in Great Britain needs clarifying, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova wrote on her official Facebook page. Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, said that WikiLeaks founder Assange is showing symptoms of having been exposed to psychological torture for a number of years in the United Kingdom in a commentary with The Times newspaper published on Friday. “That’s really something. Look at what the freedom fighters and human rights activists are actually doing. We are waiting for official explanations from the [United] Kingdom,” she concluded. LONDON, May 30 -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange missed a court session Thursday, apparently due to health problems. He had been expected to appear from prison via video link at a brief extradition hearing at Westminster Magistrates' Court. Lawyer Gareth Peirce told the court Assange was "not very well.'' Assange, 47, is in Belmarsh Prison serving a 50-week sentence for jumping bail in Britain while fighting extradition to the United States, which accuses him of violating the Espionage Act by publishing secret documents containing the names of confidential military and diplomatic sources. Sweden also seeks him for questioning about an alleged rape, which Assange has denied. It is not clear which claim would take precedence. The decision would likely be made by Britain's home secretary. Judge Emma Arbuthnot said a more substantive extradition hearing set for June 12 may be moved to a court next to Belmarsh Prison for convenience. Roughly two dozen supporters chanted ``Free Assange'' outside the courthouse. His case has attracted fresh support from free press advocates in the week since the U.S. filed serious espionage charges against him. He had earlier been held on suspicion of conspiracy to break into classified computer systems, a less serious charge. WikiLeaks said in a statement it has "grave concerns" about Assange's health. The anti-secrecy group says he has been moved to the prison health ward. The group says Assange has "dramatically lost weight" and recently "it was not possible to conduct a normal conversation with him." The complicated extradition process, which involves both Sweden and the United States and deals with press freedom and national security issues, is expected to last for months or years. Assange was arrested by British police in April after Ecuadorian officials withdrew his asylum status. He had sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2012 when Sweden was trying to question him about sexual misconduct allegations. LOS ANGELES, May 15 -- Authorities in mainland China have blocked Wikipedia, its owner said on Wednesday. “In April, the Wikimedia Foundation determined that Wikipedia was no longer accessible in China,” Samantha Lien, spokeswoman for the foundation, which owns the online encyclopaedia, said. “After closely analysing our internal traffic reports, we can confirm Wikipedia is blocked across all language versions,” Lien said. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media sites have long been blocked in mainland China, as have individual Wikipedia articles about sensitive issues, like the 1989 pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square and the Himalayan region of Tibet. Suspicion of a total block on Wikipedia surfaced in late April when some Chinese internet users took to social media to complain the site was no longer accessible. Tests run by GreatFire.org, an organisation that tracks internet censorship in China, showed the site had not been accessible from within mainland China since April 23. LONDON, May 2 -- WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange faces an initial hearing in London on Thursday over an extradition request from the United States, a day after he was jailed for 50 weeks for jumping bail. The US wants to extradite the Australian whistle-blower, who was arrested on April 11 after spending seven years in Ecuador’s London embassy, to face charges of “conspiracy” for working with former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning. The US indictment, which was only revealed following his dramatic arrest for breaching bail, accuses him of helping crack a password stored on US department of defence computers in March 2010. The charge carries a maximum sentence of five years. Manning passed hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, exposing US military wrong-doing in the Iraq war and diplomatic secrets about scores of countries. WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson said on Wednesday that all efforts would now be focused on preventing Assange’s extradition to the US. “It will be a question of life and death,” he warned. Assange’s supporters believe that more serious charges could be filed if he is transferred to the US, and he fears the death penalty. Hrafnsson was speaking outside London’s Southwark Crown Court, where a British judge handed Assange a 50-week jail term for breaching a British court order when he sought refuge in the embassy in June 2012. ‘I apologise unreservedly’ At the time, Swedish authorities wanted to extradite Assange over claims of sexual assault and rape, which he denied. He claimed the allegations were a pretext to transfer him to the United States. There is no longer an active investigation in Sweden and the extradition request has lapsed, but Assange was still accountable for breaching British law, leading to him being dragged shouting from the embassy by police when Ecuador gave him up last month. The 47-year-old, his shaggy beard neatly trimmed, raised his fist to supporters in the public gallery at Southwark Crown Court as he was taken down to the cells. In a letter read out on his behalf, Assange expressed regret, saying: “I did what I thought at the time was the best or perhaps the only thing that I could have done.” “I apologise unreservedly,” he said. Assange’s team is fighting his extradition and the process could take years. WikiLeaks is also back in the news in the United States, over its alleged role in the leak of Hillary Clinton’s emails in 2016 US presidential election. The Swedish claims against Assange date back to 2010, when he was at the centre of a global storm over WikiLeaks’ exposures. The sexual assault claim expired in 2015, but while the rape claim was dropped in 2017, the alleged victim wants the case reopened. If Stockholm makes a formal extradition request, Britain must decide whether to consider it before or after that of the United States. LONDON, May 1 -- A UK judge has sentenced WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to 50 weeks in prison for skipping bail seven years ago and holing up in the Ecuadorian embassy. Judge Deborah Taylor said it was hard to imagine a more serious version of the offence as she gave the 47-year-old hacker a sentence close to the maximum of a year in custody. She said Assange's seven years in the embassy had cost UK taxpayers 16 million pounds ($21m) and said he sought asylum as a "deliberate attempt to delay justice". The white-haired Assange stood impassively with his hands clasped while the sentence was read. His supporters in the public gallery at Southwark Crown Court chanted "Shame on you" at the judge as Assange was led away. An Australian citizen, Assange sought asylum in the South American country's London embassy in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he was wanted for questioning over rape and sexual assault allegations. Assange's lawyer Mark Summers told a courtroom packed with journalists and WikiLeaks supporters that his client sought refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy because "he was living with overwhelming fear of being rendered to the US". He said Assange had a "well-founded" fear that he would be mistreated and possibly sent to the US detention camp for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay. Summers read a letter from Assange apologising for his behaviour in 2012 and saying "I did what I thought was best". "I found myself struggling with terrifying circumstances," the letter said. Assange was arrested on April 11 after Ecuador revoked his political asylum, accusing him of everything from meddling in the nation's foreign affairs to poor hygiene. He faces a separate court hearing on Thursday on a US extradition request. US authorities have charged Assange with conspiring to break into a Pentagon computer system. Asylum revoked A bedraggled and sickly looking Assange was dragged out of the embassy building in the UK capital by officers and bundled into a police van after the South American country abruptly revoked his asylum. Assange, 47, was initially arrested for breaching bail terms and was later found guilty before a London court. In the earlier hearing, a judge said Assange displayed the "behaviour of a narcissist who cannot get beyond his own selfish interest". Police said they had been "invited into the embassy by the ambassador, following the Ecuadorean government's withdrawal of asylum". Assange was arrested upon arrival at a police station on behalf of the United States after it requested his extradition, police added. US federal prosecutors charged him with computer hacking and aiding whistle-blower Chelsea Manning, which they said carries a potential five-year prison term. Speaking to reporters outside the court after Assange's arrest, WikiLeaks editor Kristinn Hrafnsson said the case sets a dangerous precedent, and that Assange may face even more charges if he is delivered to the US. "Anyone who wants the press to be free should consider the implications of this case. If they will extradite a journalist to the US, then no journalist will be safe." "There is no assurance that there won't be additional charges when he is on US soil," Hrafnsson added. LONDON, April 13 -- More than 70 British members of parliament have signed a letter urging the home secretary to ensure that WikiLeaks cofounder Julian Assange is extradited to Sweden if a case there is reopened against him. The letter, signed late on Friday by mostly Labour Party MPs, urged UK Home Secretary Sajid Javid to "stand with the victims of sexual violence" and ensure the rape claim against him can be "properly investigated". "We do not presume guilt, of course, but we believe due process should be followed and the complainant should see justice be done," it said. The 47-year-old Australian activist was arrested by British police on Thursday and forcibly removed from the Ecuadorian embassy in London after his asylum was revoked, bringing to an end more than six years in the building. Assange originally sought asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden, where prosecutors wanted to question him over a rape allegation, which he denied. Sweden suspended its investigation of serious sexual misconduct two years ago because Assange was beyond their reach while at the embassy. But on Friday, Swedish prosecutors said they were examining the rape case at the request of the alleged victim's lawyer. Embarrassing information British Shadow Home Secretary Diane Abbott said it was right that he should face justice if charges are brought. "If the Swedish government wants to come forward with those charges, I believe that Assange should face the criminal justice system," said Abbott, who added that the arrest was politically motivated as WikiLeaks has published enormous tranches of sensitive military information. "We all know what this is about. It's not the rape charges, serious as they are, it's about WikiLeaks. All that embarrassing information about the activities of the American military that was made public and that is what it is about." The move by British MPs to push for Assange's extradition to Sweden came hours after the Labour Party called on the government to halt his extradition to the United States, where he has been charged with offences related to his work with whistle-blower Chelsea Manning. Abbott said Prime Minister Theresa May should intervene as she did in the case of British hacker Gary McKinnon, whose extradition request she rejected on medical grounds in 2012. But May has shown no desire to interfere with the US's wishes this time. She welcomed the arrest in Parliament on Thursday, where Sajid Javid, the current home secretary, accused Labour of supporting a man with "a track record of undermining the UK and our allies and the values we stand for". US prosecutors say Assange faces five years in prison if convicted of "conspiracy to commit computer intrusion", though further charges are expected to be brought against him. Abbott's comments followed a post on Twitter by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn on Thursday that praised Assange's exposing of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan and said that his extradition to the US "should be opposed by the British government". KUALA LUMPUR, April 12 --The spectacle of Julian Assange, bearded and haggard, resisting arrest while London police officers dragged him through the street, punctuated the end of seven confounding years inside the Ecuadorean Embassy, where he lived with his cat in a small corner room as the world's most famous self-proclaimed political refugee. Assange, 47, has long fashioned himself as a crusader for revealing secrets. The Internet group he founded, WikiLeaks, published caches of classified US government communications, as well as e-mails hacked by Russian intelligence clearly intended to damage the presidential candidacy of Mrs Hillary Clinton. Though arrested on Thursday (April 11) morning by the British for skipping bail, Assange was immediately charged in the United States for conspiracy to hack a government computer. To supporters, Assange is a martyr and champion of free speech. To the US government, he is a pariah and a lackey of the Kremlin. But it was the hardened opinion of Ecuador's government that perhaps mattered most. He had become an unwanted houseguest. At the tiny red-brick embassy, he continued to run his Internet group, conducted news conferences before hundreds of fawning admirers from a balcony, rode his skateboard in the halls, and played host to a parade of visitors, including Lady Gaga and Pamela Anderson, a rumoured lover who brought vegan sandwiches. On Thursday, Anderson sent out a batch of Twitter messages attacking the arrest as a "vile injustice" and called Britain and the US "devils and liars and thieves". In interviews with The New York Times in 2016, as part of a long look at his ties to Russia, Assange denied any link to Russian intelligence, in particular regarding the leaked Democratic e-mails. Mrs Clinton and the Democrats were "whipping up a neo-McCarthyist hysteria about Russia", he said. There is "no concrete evidence" that what WikiLeaks publishes comes from intelligence agencies, he said, even as he indicated that he would happily accept such material. Small as they were, Assange's living quarters at the embassy, close to the lavish self-indulgence of Harrods, the famous department store, did not cramp his desire to remain in the limelight. Assange had an office equipped with a bed, sunlamp, phone, computer, kitchenette, shower, treadmill and bookshelves. Three years ago, one person familiar with the set-up called it "a gas station with two attendants". Mr Vaughan Smith, who had been a long-time supporter of Assange and helped put up his bail money, said: "Julian's a big bloke, with big bones, and he fills the room physically and intellectually." "It's a tiny embassy with a tiny balcony," he added, "small, hot and with not great air flow, and it must be jolly difficult for everyone there." But from there, Assange for years held court for admirers and famous curiosity seekers, among them footabll star Eric Cantona, and Mr Nigel Farage, the pro-Brexit radio host and former head of UK Independence Party. Still, Assange's isolation was wearing on him, a friend said on Thursday, especially the long, lonely weekends in an essentially empty embassy he could not leave. Even his friends have described him as difficult, a narcissist with an outsized view of his importance and a disinterest in mundane matters like personal hygiene. He was becoming deeply depressed and wondered about simply walking out, the friend said, speaking on condition of anonymity. And relations with his hosts were becoming deeply strained, even adversarial. A copy of a 2014 letter from Mr Juan Falconi Puig, then Ecuador's ambassador to Britain, to the Foreign Ministry, seen by The New York Times, outlined the growing resentment between the diplomats and Assange over his behaviour at the embassy. Among Mr Falconi's top concerns was Assange's penchant for riding a skateboard and playing football with visitors. His skateboarding, Mr Falconi said, had "damaged floors, walls and doors". The ambassador said the football games had destroyed embassy equipment. When an embassy security agent stopped the game and took away the ball, Assange "began to shake, insult and push the agent", reclaimed the ball and then "launched the ball at his body". The letter said Assange had invited a television reporter to interview them at the embassy and had showed the visitor off-limits parts of the building. At one point, according to the letter, Assange used the alarm setting on a megaphone "to attract the police" to record them for the show. "This last action, in the middle of the night, was a clear attempt to annoy the police," Mr Falconi wrote. Another time, the letter said, Assange "violently hit the embassy control room door" demanding in a "threatening manner" that one of the guards come out to speak to him. The guards came out, only to be harassed by Assange, who yelled and shoved them, Mr Falconi wrote. Assange's long presence in the embassy, long after the Ecuadorean president who granted him political asylum had been replaced, finally became too much for the Ecuadorean government. President Lenin Moreno, elected in 2017, explained the decision on Twitter and in a video. "In a sovereign decision, Ecuador withdrew the asylum status to Julian Assange after his repeated violations to international conventions and daily-life protocols," he said. He accused Assange of having installed forbidden "electronic and distortion equipment", accessing the embassy's security files without permission, blocking the embassy's security cameras and mistreating its personnel, including guards. BUENOS AIRES, April 12 -- Ecuador’s police have detained an accomplice of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Ecuadorian Interior Minister Maria Paula Romo said on Thursday. "A person who is close to him lives here, we have convincing evidence that he maintained contacts with former Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino. He was detained this afternoon," she told Sonorama radio station. Assange’s accomplice was hauled off at the airport when he tried to fly to Japan. At a news conference, Roma said that Ecuador’s authorities had information that a person close to Assange, who lives in Ecuador, "contributed to the attempts of destabilizing the situation in the country with the goal of harming the government." Daily Express reported citing journalist Vijay Prashad that the detained individual was Swedish national Ola Bini, a WikiLeaks software developer. He does not speak Spanish. In 2006, Assange set up WikiLeaks that published classified documents on certain governments, including the US. In 2012, Assange sought asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in a bid to avoid extradition to Sweden, which had issued a warrant for his arrest on sexual harassment and rape charges. He was holed up inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London for nearly seven years. On Thursday, Ecuador terminated political asylum of Assange. British police arrested Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy for breaching bail issued in 2012 and on a US extradition warrant issued in 2018. Assange’s attorneys fear that in case of his handover to the US, he may face up to 35 years in jail or capital punishment. However, the US Department of Justice claims that the Australian faces just five years behind bars on hacking charges. The Metropolitan Police Service also said it "had a duty to execute the warrant, on behalf of Westminster Magistrates' Court, and was invited into the embassy by the Ambassador, following the Ecuadorian government's withdrawal of asylum." British Home Secretary Sajid Javid, in turn, said on Twitter that "nearly seven years after entering the Ecuadorean Embassy, I can confirm Julian Assange is now in police custody and rightly facing justice in the UK". "I would like to thank Ecuador for its cooperation and the Metropolitan Police for its professionalism. No one is above the law," he added.
Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno said on Thursday that Ecuador had decided to withdraw diplomatic asylum from Assange. |
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