The founder of Wikileaks, Julian Assange, is set to be questioned by Swedish authorities at the Ecuadorian embassy where he has been living for the past three years. This was given the go ahead by the Ecuadorian government but is not set to take place until the New Year. The questions are expected to relate to the ongoing sexual assault charges that were levied against Assange back in 2012.
He has consistenly denied the charges, stating that they were trumped up in order to have him extradited to Sweden, where he could in turn be extradited to America to face investigation for his running of the Wikileaks website. Although they have respected his right to asylum, the British government has accused Ecuador of perverting justice by harboring Assange for the past three years.
In the wake of this news, Assange's legal defence team, headed by Baltasar Garzon, stated that the U.K. and Sweden must continue to respect his fundamental rights and reiterated that that was all Mr Assange wanted as part of his ongoing seclusion, as per the BBC.
Although there were initially three charges levied against Assange, in August this year the Swedish authorities dropped two of them, leaving just the singular charge which will expire in 2020. If he remains in the embassy until that date, Assange will be 48 when he leaves.
The British authorities recently announced that they had stopped day and night surveillance of the embassy, which cost upwards of £10,500 per day.
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KitGuru Says: It must be bizarre living your life in a foreign embassy. I wonder if he will stick it out to 2020. What do you think?
I dislike how they always rack up money he has costed the british government. They had them at one point completely surrounding the building in an effort to deter any sympathy and tell them it was costing millions of pounds. It’s just them applying pressure and swaying public opinion by claiming he is costing the british government millions. If you have on duty officers who guard the place and monitor and provide surveillance, you would still be paying them whether they were off shooting minorities or harassing the homeless or whether they were assigned to monitor this place with pressures of the US government. The swedes have been invaded by the US government as well to provide pressure against thepiratebay to close it and any laws and loopholes. Two governments doing the US’s bidding in this case.
Indeed, well done the British government for wasting large amounts of money on this, whilst simultaneously cutting police force budgets across the land. Clearly if this was a lower profile case he would be gone and forgotten by now, they’d have stopped caring the moment he hit the embassy.
An EU arrest warrant was issued on Assange, despite never having been charged with anything. This tells you all you need to know about the lengths the US will go to in their efforts to cover up illegality and war crimes committed during the Iraq invasion. The British and Swedish governments should be ashamed of themselves for being complicit in the USA’s crimes.