Ecuador’s government negotiating Julian Assange’s fate with the UK
By Bill Van Auken
12 July 2018
Within the last week, Ecuador’s President Lenín Moreno and Foreign Minister José Valencia have issued public statements indicating that they are in negotiations with the UK government of Prime Minister Theresa May regarding the fate of WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange, who has spent the last six years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he sought asylum in June 2012.
The statements of Moreno and Valencia are ominous. They both indicate that the Ecuadorian government is proceeding in its efforts to “solve the problem of Assange” not on the basis of international law and the basic democratic right to asylum, but rather according to national and international political expediency, under conditions in which the government in Quito is turning sharply to the right and coming under intense pressure from both US and British imperialism.
