Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno said that the UK has provided written assurances that they will not extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to any country where he will face the death penalty.
Moreno claims that this is a sufficient guarantee for Assange to be able to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he has been residing since being granted asylum in 2012.
During Moreno’s radio interview, he did not say that he will be forcing Assange to leave — but stated that the WikiLeaks legal team is considering what to do.
It was recently revealed through a filing error that Assange has been secretly charged in the United States — though the nature of the charges remains unknown.
At the end of November, a judge heard arguments about unsealing the charges, but no decision was made.
The US government argued that the press and the public have no right to know what the charges against the publisher actually are. He explained that he would be willing to provide more information in a closed setting.
The UK has refused to acknowledge the findings of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD), which found that he is being arbitrarily and unlawfully detained and must be immediately released and compensated.
As Matt Taibbi recently wrote in a must read op-ed for Rolling Stone, “the more likely eventuality is a prosecution that uses the unpopularity of Assange to shut one of the last loopholes in our expanding secrecy bureaucracy. Americans seem not to grasp what might be at stake. Wikileaks briefly opened a window into the uglier side of our society, and if publication of such leaks is criminalized, it probably won’t open again.”
