WikiLeaks'
Assange seeks asylum at Ecuador embassy
By
Alexandra Valencia and Avril Ormsby QUITO/LONDON
| Tue Jun 19, 2012
(Reuters)
- WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange has taken refuge in Ecuador's embassy in
London and asked for asylum, officials said on Tuesday, in a
last-ditch bid to avoid extradition to Sweden over sex crime accusations.
Ecuadorean
Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said his country would weigh the request from
the 40-year-old hacker, famous for leaking hundreds of thousands of U.S.
diplomatic cables.
The
appeal for protection was the latest twist in Assange's 18-month fight
against being sent to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning about allegations
of rape and sexual assault made by two female former WikiLeaks volunteers.
The
situation threatens to inflame tensions between the government of Rafael
Correa, Ecuador's leftist and ardently anti-Washington president,
and U.S. authorities, who accuse Assange of damaging its foreign relations with
his leaks.
The
Andean nation in 2010 invited Assange to seek residency there but
quickly backed off the idea, accusing him of breaking U.S. laws.
Since
his detention, Assange has mostly been living under strict bail conditions at
the country mansion of a wealthy supporter in eastern England. His associates
say that amounts to 540 days under house arrest without charge. Breach
of bail conditions is potentially a criminal offence.
"While
the department assesses Mr. Assange's application, Mr. Assange will remain
at the embassy, under the protection of the Ecuadorean Government,"
the embassy said on its website.
Assange
.. complaining that his home country of Australia had abandoned him and
refused to defend him, according to a statement from Ecuador's Foreign
Ministry.
According
to Patino, Assange fears extradition "to a country where espionage and
treason are punished with the death penalty". He appeared to be
referring to the United States, because Sweden does not have the death penalty.
Neither Sweden nor the United States has charged him with treason or spying.
The
lawyer for the two female former WikiLeaks volunteers who made the complaints
against Assange said he was not surprised by Assange's latest move but expected
Ecuador to reject the asylum request.
Britain's Supreme Court last week said Assange could be extradited to Sweden
in about two weeks' time, rejecting his argument that a European arrest warrant
issued by Swedish prosecutors for his extradition was invalid.
The
only recourse left to him through the courts is an appeal to the European Court
of Human Rights.
Assange, who has not been charged with any offence in Sweden and
denies any wrongdoing, has argued
that the case is politically
motivated because the release of documents on his website has
angered the United States.
In
2010, WikiLeaks began releasing secret video footage and thousands of U.S.
diplomatic cables, many of them about Iraq and Afghanistan, in the largest leak of
classified documents in U.S. history.
The
silver-haired Assange spent nine days in jail in Britain before being released
on bail on December 16, 2010, after his supporters raised a surety of 200,000
pounds.
Anti-censorship
campaigners who backed Assange at one stage included celebrities such as
journalist John Pilger, film director Ken Loach and socialite Jemima Khan.
As
part of his bail conditions, he had to abide by a curfew, report to police
daily, and wear an electronic tag.
Wikileaks
has faded from the headlines due to a dearth of scoops and a blockade by credit
card companies that has made donations to the site almost impossible.
(Additional
reporting by Patrick
Lannin in Stockholm and Mark
Hosenball in Washington DC; Writing by Brian Ellsworth and Daniel
Wallis; Editing by Andrew
Heavens)
Wikileaks
Moves to Farce: Will Assange Live Out His Days in an Ecuadorian Embassy?
by
Peter Spiro June 20, 2012
(DO
– even assuming asylum is granted, the host government should agree to the
passage of asylum-seeker out of the country)
Story here, and a lot of play
on this morning’s BBC Newshour.
This is the second time in recent months that so-called “diplomatic
asylum” has crept into the headlines, last with respect to Chen Guangcheng in
China in May. See this earlier post, which links to an excellent
Foreign Policy background piece on diplomatic asylum.
Unlike
the Chen case, I doubt very much that the UK will agree to Assange’s safe
passage out of the country
on the way to Ecuador even if
Ecuador grants him asylum (which itself seems like a stretch, insofar as
the Swedish sex case against Assange hardly qualifies as political persecution, at
least not as customarily conceived – but see the Embassy of Ecuador’s
statement here). So the best Assange can hope for is a long stay in
non-country house quarters.
Speaking
of Ecuador, is it trying to revive its imperial ambitions, in some postmodern
way? See this engaging piece by Frank Jacobs,
the master of cartographic stories, coincidentally out today in the NY Times
(calling Duncan Hollis: interesting treaty tales therein)
Statement
on Julian Assange
June
19, 2012
The
decision to consider Mr Assange’s application for protective asylum should in
no way be interpreted as the Government of Ecuador interfering in the judicial
processes of either the United Kingdom or Sweden
Assange's
asylum bid a possible boon for Ecuador's Correa
By
Alexander Martinez | AFP – Wed, Jun 20, 2012
Ecuador
may well grant WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange's request for political asylum,
analysts say, in a bid by President Rafael Correa to needle the United States
and boost his image at home.
Analysts
here say that coming to Assange's rescue might help Correa offset the storm of
international criticism over his campaign against the opposition media in
Ecuador.
The
court sentenced three top executives of the Quito daily El Universal, and a
former editorial page editor to three years in prison. Correa was awarded $40
million in damages.
Rights
groups -- including Human Rights Watch, Reporters Without Borders and the Inter
American Press Association -- called the ruling a blow to freedom of speech in
Ecuador.
In
February, Correa pardoned the executives and voided the monetary damages, but
the criticism has barely subsided: according to the Ecuadoran NGO Fundamedios,
the government's persecution of the opposition press continues.
But ego clashes and media personality conflicts are
pitifully trivial when weighed against what is at stake in this case: both for
Assange personally and for the greater cause of transparency. If he's guilty of
any crimes in Sweden, he should be held to account. But until then, he has
every right to invoke the legal protections available to everyone else. Even
more so, as a foreign national accused of harming US national security,
he has every reason to want to avoid ending up in the travesty known as the
American judicial system
Assange
seeks asylum in Ecuador
By
Elias Groll Tuesday, June 19, 2012
Assange
has been in Britain for the better part of the past year while fighting the
extradition order to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning in connection
with alleged sex crimes
Sweden,
of course, does not have the death penalty on the books, but Assange has
long maintained that the extradition order is part of a conspiracy by the
American government to have him extradited to the United States in order to
face espionage charges, a crime for which he could face the death penalty.
Swedish prosecutors have not charged Assange with a crime.
The
choice to seek asylum in Ecuador may seem surprising, but Ecuador's president,
Rafael Correa, has closely aligned himself with Hugo Chavez's Venezuela and Evo
Morales' Bolivia, and like his South American compatriots, Correa preaches a
political doctrine willing to crack down on press freedoms and political rights
to preserve his particular brand of socialism. Additionally, Correa and Assange have
something of a personal history-Assange interviewed Correa this year on
his RT talk show, and Ecuador offered the Australian hacker-cum-provocateur residence in 2010.
Complicating
matters, Ecuador has signed extradition treaties with
both the United States and
the European Union,
but given Assange's decision to pursue asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in
London, it would appear unlikely that Ecuador will enforce those agreements
Julian
Assange's right to asylum
Glenn
Greenwald Wednesday 20 June 2012
Given
the travesty that is American justice, WikiLeaks' founder is entitled to seek
asylum and well-advised to fear extradition
If
one asks current or former WikiLeaks associates
what their greatest fear is, almost none cites prosecution by their own
country. Most trust their own nation's justice system to recognize that they
have committed no crime. The primary
fear is being turned over to the US. That is the crucial context for understanding Julian Assange's
16-month fight to avoid extradition to Sweden, a fight that led him to
seek asylum, Tuesday, in the London Embassy of Ecuador.
The evidence that the US seeks to
prosecute and extradite Assange is substantial. There
is no question that the Obama justice department has convened an
active grand jury to investigate whether
WikiLeaks violated the draconian Espionage Act of 1917. Key senators
from President Obama's party, including Senate intelligence committee
chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, have publicly
called for his prosecution under that statute. A leaked email from the
security firm Stratfor – hardly a dispositive source, but still probative
– indicated that
a sealed indictment has already been obtained against him. Prominent
American figures in both parties have demanded Assange's lifelong
imprisonment, called
him a terrorist, and even advocated his assassination.
For
several reasons, Assange has long feared that the US would be able to coerce
Sweden into handing him over far more easily than if he were in Britain. For
one, smaller countries such as Sweden are generally more susceptible to
American pressure and bullying.
For
another, that country has a disturbing history of lawlessly handing over
suspects to the US. A 2006
UN ruling found Sweden in violation of the global ban on
torture for helping the CIA render two
suspected terrorists to Egypt, where they were brutally tortured (both
individuals, asylum-seekers in Sweden, were ultimately found to be innocent of
any connection to terrorism and received a monetary settlement from the Swedish
government).
Perhaps
most disturbingly of all, Swedish law
permits extreme levels of secrecy in judicial proceedings and
oppressive pre-trial conditions, enabling any Swedish-US transactions
concerning Assange to be conducted beyond public scrutiny. Ironically, even the US State
Department condemned Sweden's "restrictive conditions
for prisoners held in pretrial custody", including severe restrictions on
their communications with the outside world.
Assange's fear of ending up in the
clutches of the US is plainly rational and well-grounded. One need only look at the treatment over the last decade of
foreign nationals accused of harming American national security to know that's
true; such individuals are still routinely imprisoned for lengthy periods
without any charges or due process. Or consider the treatment of Bradley Manning,
accused of leaking to WikiLeaks: a formal
UN investigation found that his pre-trial conditions of severe
solitary confinement were "cruel, inhuman and degrading", and he now
faces capital charges of aiding al-Qaida. The Obama administration's
unprecedented obsession with persecuting whistleblowers and preventing
transparency – what even generally
supportive, liberal magazines call "Obama's war on
whistleblowers" – makes those concerns all the more valid.
No responsible person should have formed
a judgment one way or the other as to whether Assange is guilty of anything in
Sweden. He
has not even been charged, let alone tried or convicted, of sexual assault,
and he is entitled to a presumption of innocence. The accusations made against
him are serious ones, and deserve to be taken seriously and accorded a fair and
legal resolution.
But
the WikiLeaks founder, like everyone else, is fully entitled to invoke all of
his legal rights, and it's profoundly reckless and irresponsible to suggest, as some
have, that he has done anything wrong by doing so. Seeking asylum on the
grounds of claimed human rights violations
is a longstanding
and well-recognized right in international law. It is unseemly, at
best, to insist that he forego his rights in order to herd him as quickly as
possible to Sweden.
Assange
is not a fugitive and has not fled. Everyone
knows where he is. If Ecuador rejects
his asylum request, he will be right back in the hands of British authorities,
who will presumably extradite him to Sweden without delay. At every step of the
process, he has adhered to, rather than violated, the rule of law. His asylum
request of yesterday is no exception.
Julian
Assange has sparked intense personal animosity, especially in media circles – a
revealing irony, given that he has helped to bring about more transparency and
generated more newsworthy scoops than all media outlets combined over the last
several years. That animosity often leads media commentators to toss aside
their professed beliefs and principles out of an eagerness to see him shamed or
punished.
