Remarks made earlier this week by Ecuador’s Foreign Minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa suggest that her government may be depriving Assange of the political asylum it granted him in in 2012 and hand him over to British and then US authorities, the World Socialist Website wrote on Saturday.
In an interview on Wednesday, Espinosa said that the Ecuadorian government and Britain “have the intention and the interest that this be resolved.”
In March, the Ecuadorian government cut Assange’s phone and Internet contact with the outside world and barred his friends and supporters from visiting him.
The Ecuadorian authorities explained their action by stating that “Assange’s behavior, through his messages on social media, put at risk good relations this country has with the UK, the rest of the EU and other nations.”
If Assange is handed over to the British authorities, they could eventually extradite him to the United States to face prosecution over Wikileaks’ publication of leaked US military and diplomatic documents.
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Last year, US Attorney General Jeff Sessions stated that putting Assange on trial for espionage was a “priority” and then-CIA Director Mike Pompeo, now secretary of state, asserted that WikiLeaks was a “non-state hostile intelligence service.”
In 2010, WikiLeaks published information leaked by US soldier Bradley Manning that exposed war crimes committed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as thousands of secret US diplomatic cables.