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OpEdNews Op Eds    H2'ed 5/17/18

Ecuador's Ex-President Rafael Correa Denounces Treatment of Julian Assange as "Torture"

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FORMER ECUADORIAN PRESIDENT Rafael Correa, in an exclusive interview with The Intercept on Wednesday morning, denounced his country's current government for blocking Julian Assange from receiving visitors in its embassy in London as a form of "torture" and a violation of Ecuador's duties to protect Assange's safety and well-being. Correa said this took place in the context of Ecuador no longer maintaining "normal sovereign relations with the American government -- just submission."

Correa also responded to a widely discussed Guardian article yesterday, which claimed that "Ecuador bankrolled a multimillion-dollar spy operation to protect and support Julian Assange in its central London embassy." The former president mocked the story as highly "sensationalistic," accusing The Guardian of seeking to depict routine and modest embassy security measures as something scandalous or unusual.

On March 27, Assange's internet access at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London was cut off by Ecuadorian officials, who also installed jamming devices to prevent Assange from accessing the internet using other means of connection. Assange's previously active Twitter account has had no activity since then, nor have any journalists been able to communicate with him. All visitors to the embassy have also been denied access to Assange, who was formally made a citizen of Ecuador earlier this year.

Assange has been confined to the embassy for almost six years, when Ecuador granted him asylum in August 2012. The grant of asylum was made on the grounds that Assange's extradition to Sweden for a sexual assault investigation would likely result in being sent to the U.S. for prosecution, where he could face the death penalty.

From the start, Ecuador told both the U.K. and Swedish governments that it would immediately send Assange to Stockholm in exchange for a pledge from Sweden not to use that as a pretext to extradite him to the U.S., something the Swedish government had the power to do but refused.

Correa also emphasized that Ecuador, from the start, told Swedish investigators that they were welcome to interrogate Assange in their embassy, but almost five years elapsed before Swedish prosecutors -- in 2016 -- finally did so. Citing those facts, a United Nations panel ruled in 2016 that the actions of the U.K. government constituted "arbitrary detention" and a violation of Assange's fundamental human rights, a decision British officials quickly said they intended to ignore.

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[Subscribe to Glenn Greenwald] Glenn Greenwald is a journalist,former constitutional lawyer, and author of four New York Times bestselling books on politics and law. His most recent book, "No Place to Hide," is about the U.S. surveillance state and his experiences reporting on the Snowden documents around the world. His forthcoming book, to be published in April, 2021, is about Brazilian history and current politics, with a focus on his experience in reporting a series of expose's in 2019 and 2020 which exposed high-level corruption by powerful officials in the government of President Jair Bolsonaro, which subsequently attempted to prosecute him for that reporting.

Foreign Policy magazine named Greenwald one of the top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013. He was the debut winner, along with "Democracy Now's" Amy Goodman, of the Park Center I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2008, and also received the 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work breaking the story of the abusive (more...)
 

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