> URGENT: Ecuador has illegally terminated Assange political asylum in violation of international law. He was arrested by the British police inside the Ecuadorian embassy minutes ago.
It's very common practice around the world if a person's circumstances change and their original country is now safe. Likewise if Ecuador believes that there is no longer a threat to Assange they can revoke it.
No, but politically persecuting Assange under pretexts is. Since (I assume) Ecuador protected him not because they oppose persecution for sexual assault, but because they believed that was a pretext for political persecution, I do not see how the circumstances have changed. Except for the Ecuadorian embassy staff reportedly getting fed up with Assange, of course.
One of the ways that things have changed is the continued illegal political campaigning whilst in the embassy that Assange is accused of. Asylum doesn't give protection against breaking the law in the host country.
> At Westminster Magistrates' Court on Thursday he [Assange] was found guilty of failing to surrender to the court.
>The indictment against Assange, issued last year in the state of Virginia, alleges that he conspired in 2010 with Manning to access classified information on Department of Defense computers. He faces up to five years in jail.
I'm honestly out of the loop. Is there concrete irrefutable evidence Assange helped electing Trump? Seems weird, even more so with them then turning around and pushing for his arrest. And being an annoying guest? Are you talking about the new rules introduced by the embassy only to be looked at later saying "you broke them"?
This indictment from the Meuller investigation details how GRU agents hacked the Democratic Party and coordinated with WikiLeaks (“Organization 1” in the indictment) to release the documents they obtained (using the personas “DCLeaks”, “Guccifer 2.0”).
I'm conflicted about this. It seems to be proving Wikileaks timed the release to have an effect on the election, and was aware of its wider effects, but don't you think if someone else came to them with a similar release benefiting the opposite party they would have behaved the same way? I still find it difficult to fault Wikileaks for this. They just did the leaking.
From that PDF: Organization 1 added, “if you have anything hillary related we want it in the next tweo [sic] days prefable [sic] because the DNC [Democratic National Convention] is approaching and she will solidify bernie supporters behind her after.” The Conspirators responded, “ok . . . i see.” Organization 1 explained, “we think trump has only a 25% chance of winning against hillary . . . so conflict between bernie and hillary is interesting.”
The Panama Papers were released a couple years after changes in US/Panama law meant that it was no longer a great country to launder your money for US citizens, hence why the only US citizens caught in it didn't show any wrongdoing.
Whether anything Assange did was actually decisive in Trump's election is a pretty speculative question, but we do have leaked transcripts of his messages to Donald Trump Jr...
The Russian press are all over any story they can spin to make it look like the West isn't the bastion of freedom, equality and democracy it claims to be - basically, anything which makes us look like our own papers' descriptions of Russia. So that doesn't say much.
(Also, ironically this BBC article and other outlets are having to use a video of Assange's arrest from Ruptly, a subsidiary of Russia Today, because they bought into their own narrative about his impending arrest being a construct of his own imagination so hard they didn't have any reporters outside to catch it.)
The claim is based on Wikileaks offering up information that portrays the US negatively, but little to nothing that does the same against Russia.
From there, linked with the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory, claims of them supporting the Trump campaign came to be.
Regardless of your opinion on Trump, I’m not sure that offering up one-sided info that benefits or hurts a candidate is or should be an arrestable offense. Entire television news networks do it.
I am saying that you can hardly deduct anything about their positive affiliation with Russia just because they haven't exposed things about Russia.
So unless they aren't looking for things to leak about Russia because of being in the cahoots with them then it's hardly an argument that because nothing is leaked about Russia they are somehow not attempting.
Why do people keep saying that he helped elect trump. Because he exposed lies and corruption of another candidate? Are people still bitter and upset at the 2016 elections?
While sitting on lies and corruption of the Trump campaign? "Both sides do wrong, let's report on one side only" doesn't negate the fact that the Democrats had problems, but don't act like there wasn't any more motivation.
> to a country in which they would be in likely danger of persecution based on "race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion"
Which, precisely, of these categories do you think he fits under here?
I'm relatively neutral on Wikileaks/Assange, but this is a stretch. I don't think "illegally leaking documents" counts as a political opinion any more than I should be entitled to asylum because I have a "political opinion" that MDMA synthesis should be legal and got caught for engaging in it.
That's intended to cover things like persecution solely for being a member of a political party.
Everything is political opinion, but the legal standards are much narrower. The idea that I can hold a political opinion that "I should not be arrested for breaking laws", break a law, and then expect not to be arrested because of my political opinion is ridiculous.
I'm firmly against his potential extradition to any other country, but let's be honest -- he's not exactly in trouble with British authorities due to his "political opinions", is he?
Skipping bail. For refusing to surrender to the court after he was released on bail, following his arrest for questioning over sexual assault allegations.
Yes, the fact that Assange is prominent is obviously a factor. But that doesn't mean that there's some kind of sinister motive for enforcing the law in this case. Consider that the UK police spent £11m looking for a single missing child (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/police-madel...). Would they spend that much on a child who wasn't in the news? No. But I'm sure the people looking for her genuinely wanted to find her.
> If he was anyone else the british authorities would’ve quickly forgotten about him jumping bail.
Ignoring the specifics in this case, I'm assuming you know absolutely nothing about our legal system? Jumping bail is not taken lightly in most of the world.
I know quite a bit about your legal system thank you. It is extraordinarily unusual to spend this much money to pursue any arrest warrant, much less one for such a minor offense.
Of course, now we know that there's been an US warrant on JA since at least Dec 2017
If he was someone else who had a European Arrest Warrant outstanding for rape, the authorities would take it seriously. Our press are going to have a dim view of a foreign (alleged) rapist running around because the police couldn't be arsed.
Jumping bail to an embassy in Knightsbridge and talking to the media from the balcony isn't going to help them look the other way either.
It says it applies to the generic repatriation of refugees, not the specific repatriation of a political asylum seeker like Assange. There's also no evidence that Assange faces political persecution in the UK. His stated concern is about extradition to the USA, in which case he should apply for political asylum in the UK.
He's an Ecuadorian citizen. Does the Ecuadorian law allow for the extradition of Ecuadorian citizens? It's quite common for this to be illegal.
Of course this wouldn't be your typical extradition as he was already on UK ground, but I think it would not be unreasonable for a court to view this as an extradition.
> Does the Ecuadorian law allow for the extradition of Ecuadorian citizens
Yes, and also specifically to America, for what it's worth
> this wouldn't be your typical extradition
That's because it wouldn't be an extradition. Embassies are not extra-territorial. British police didn't storm the embassy largely out of politeness and convention.
>That's because it wouldn't be an extradition. Embassies are not extra-territorial. British police didn't storm the embassy largely out of politeness and convention.
My comment specifically acknowledged this, however I see a very real chance that a court might view this as an extradition. It is the .ec government handing him over to a foreign country after all.
There isn’t really such thing as international law. Only treaties between states that are sovereign, and as such can tear them up if they do not wish to abide to them anymore.
"International rules and customs" would be a better term. International Law is real but it is not "law" in remotely the same way that domestic laws are and using the same word for them is confusing.
Problem is, Trump says a lot of things that he doesn't mean. Or he forgets, it's a little unclear.
But the American intelligence community appears very interested in the guy and is known to have been working on extradition process in 2018.
If the American intelligence community wants to extradite Assange, I don't doubt somebody high-ranking in the CIA will sit down with the president and by the end of the meeting, have him thoroughly convinced that he's wanted Assange's extradition all along. They have agents trained in psychological operations and negotiation, and Trump is demonstrably an easy mark.
Source: https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1116273826621480960
Holy moly, this will be interesting!
EDIT:
If you're interested, here's a video of him being escorted out of the embassy --
https://twitter.com/RitaPanahi/status/1116281098747568128
EDIT2:
Comments from Snowden advising journalists to cover the story with authentic facts:
https://twitter.com/Snowden/status/1116285397284290560