London: WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange has been granted asylum by Ecuador on Thursday, a day after Britain allegedly threatened it would raid the Ecuadorean embassy in London to arrest him.
Britain has said it is determined to extradite him to Sweden, where he is accused of rape and sexual assault.
But Assange fears he will ultimately be sent to the US which is furious that his WikiLeaks website has leaked hundreds of thousands of secret US diplomatic and military cables.
Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said his country feared for the safety of the Australian, who had lodged an asylum request with President Rafael Correa, a self-declared enemy of “corrupt” media and US “imperialism”.
Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague said that London would not allow Assange safe passage out of the country, Reuters reported.
Patino told a news conference in Quito that extradition of the WikiLeaks’ founder to a third country without proper guarantees was probable, and that legal evidence showed he would not get a fair trial if eventually transferred to the United States.
“This is a sovereign decision protected by international law. It makes no sense to surmise that this implies a breaking of relations (with Britain),” he said.
Assange’s fate is still far from clear: Britain has said it could strip the Ecuadorean embassy of its diplomatic status, which would expose him to immediate arrest by the British authorities.
“The United Kingdom does not recognise the principle of diplomatic asylum,” Hague told reporters. “There is no … threat here to storm the embassy. We are talking about an Act of Parliament in this country which stresses that it must be used in full conformity with international law.”
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