Guillermo
Lasso, ex-banker and leader of Ecuador's right-wing opposition, says
he will revoke the asylum granted to Julian Assange since 2012.
In
an interview with The Guardian newspaper published Thursday,
Ecuadorean presidential candidate Guillermo Lasso, leader of the
right-wing CREO party, pledged that if he wins in next week's
presidential elections he will revoke the asylum granted to Wikileaks
publisher Julian Assange, arguing it is no longer necessary.
"The
Ecuadorean people have been paying a cost that we should not have to
bear," Lasso said during an interview in Quito. "We
will cordially ask SeƱor Assange to leave within 30 days of assuming
a mandate."
Assange
has been trapped in Ecuador's London embassy since 2012 when the
left-wing government of Rafael Correa granted Assange asylum over
concerns about his political persecution — and potential torture —
if he were deported to the U.S., given WikiLeaks' publication of
500,000 secret military files related to U.S. war crimes in
Afghanistan and Iraq.
Assange
was detained by U.K. authorities over allegations of a sexual assault
in Sweden, and yet because both the U.K. and Swedish governments
refused to guarantee that they would not deport him to the U.S. —
where whistleblower Chelsea Manning had been held in conditions the
U.N. said amounted to torture for sharing documents with Wikileaks —
Ecuador granted him asylum under international conventions protecting
individuals from political persecution.
Just
last year the U.N. ruled that the U.K. and Swedish governments were
guilty of arbitrarily detaining Assange for continually refusing to
guarantee they would not deport him to the U.S.
While
polls suggest Lasso is still far behind the leading left-wing
candidate Lenin Moreno, of the Alianza Pais party, the threat of
revoking Assange's asylum takes on new meaning given U.S. President
Donald Trump’s 2010 statement that the WikiLeaks founder should
face the death penalty for his work with Manning.
While
Trump's views on WikiLeaks appear to have softened since it published
a series of emails damaging to Hillary Clinton's election campaign,
the U.S. president’s apparent disdain for judicial process appears
to validate the Ecuadorean government’s initial doubts that Assange
could receive a fair trial in the U.S. where it is widely suspected a
grand jury has authorized charges against the Australian national.
Ecuador's
Foreign Minister, Guillaume Long, acknowledged the toll the asylum
has taken on both embassy staff and Assange, saying the arbitrary
detention "has been going on for far too long."
However,
he emphasized the blame lies squarely on the punitive intransigence
of the Swedish and U.K. authorities and reiterated that Ecuador
continues to work towards ensuring Assange's rights are respected and
international conventions respected.
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