UN working group: detaining WikiLeaks founder is unjustified

By admin On Feb 5, 2016

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A United Nations working group has ruled that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is being unjustly detained at Ecuador’s embassy in London. He should be able to roam free and claim damages.

That writes the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, or WGAD, in a report published Friday. He is being unfairly ‘detained’ by the governments of Sweden and the United Kingdom, according to the report.

Both the Swedish and British governments do not agree with the decision of the working group, spokespersons told Reuters news agency. They deny that they deprived Assange of his freedom because he voluntarily entered the embassy. The British government will immediately arrest Assange if he leaves the embassy.

The task force did not unanimously agree with Assange’s claim that he is being unjustly deprived of his liberty. Three of the five working group members agreed, one abstained and disagreed with the WikiLeaks figurehead’s view.

Assange sought refuge at the embassy in 2012 to avoid being arrested over charges in Sweden. He is a suspect in a sexual assault case there and is afraid of being extradited from Sweden to the United States because of the publication of the infamous Collateral Murder video and the Cablegate documents. The American soldier who released the documents, Chelsea Manning, was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

The Assange case has been going on since mid-2010. On December 7, 2010, he was arrested and kept in isolation for ten days. He was then placed under house arrest in the United Kingdom for 550 days. In the UK, he applied for asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy, which he has not left since August 2012.

The UN’s WGAD was established in 1991 to determine whether detention is lawful. The group is made up of independent human rights experts investigating arbitrary detention. They express themselves in a non-binding opinion on the question of whether international law has been violated. Among other things, the working group spoke out against the imprisonment of the popular politician Aung San Suu Kyi in Myanmar.