British and Ecuadorian authorities in talks to evict Julian Assange from London embassy
By Oscar Grenfell
16 July 2018
The London-based Times newspaper reported yesterday that the British and Ecuadorian governments have been holding secret discussions on plans to evict WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange from Ecuador’s London embassy, where he sought political asylum six years ago.
The article said the talks are “an attempt to remove Assange” from the embassy and are being conducted at the highest levels of government, with British Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan personally involved.
The criminal character of the conspiracy against Assange was underscored in a ruling last Friday by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the official human rights protection body of the Organization of American States, of which Ecuador is a member.
Basing its ruling on international law, the court found that states are obligated to uphold the rights of asylum. The court declared that all states, including third parties, were required to provide safe passage to the nation that had granted asylum. It found that the principle of non-refoulement—banning the return of an asylum-seeker to a nation where they faced persecution—stood in all cases, including when diplomatic asylum was gained extraterritorially.
While it did not mention Assange, the court’s ruling is a clear rebuke to the attempts to violate the WikiLeaks editor’s asylum. Assange was granted unconditional political asylum by Ecuador in 2012 and was found by the United Nations to be suffering “arbitrary detention” in violation of international law in 2016.
In their attacks on Assange, the major powers are seeking to establish new precedents for the persecution of journalists, whistleblowers and political dissidents.
Geoffrey Robertson, a prominent legal authority and advisor to WikiLeaks, warned last week that the preparations by the Trump administration to prosecute Assange on espionage charges involved the creation of a “new legal theory” that would curtail the free speech protections of the US Constitution’s First Amendment, by arguing that they did not extend to foreign journalists. He said that the defence of Assange was “moving up to be a major free press issue.”
