MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

UN warns that Julian Assange would face serious violations of human rights in the US

For the UN, Ecuador exposes Assange “to the risk of serious violations of human rights.”

For the United Nations (UN), the United Kingdom arrested “arbitrarily” WikiLeaks’s co-founder, Julian Assange, on Thursday and warned that by allowing his arrest, Ecuador has put the Australian journalist at risk of being extradited to the United States, “Exposing him to the risk of serious violations of human rights.”

”By expelling Assange from his Embassy, ​​Ecuador allowed the United Kingdom to arrest him, placing him one step closer to being extradited to the United States and, consequently, exposing him to the risk of serious human rights violations,“ said the Special Rapporteur of the UN on extrajudicial executions, Agnes Callamard.

The US Department of Justice has confirmed at noon on Thursday in a statement that the extradition order against Assange is for a crime of ”conspiracy to infiltrate“ government systems with classified information for which he could be sentenced to up to five years of jail.

The United States considers that Assange published in 2010 more than 700,000 classified documents, among which were confidential files of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and documents of the State Department of the North American country.

The diffusion of the information by Wikileaks supposed a low blow for the American diplomacy and fed a debate on the paper of Washington in the world. The United States already tried in 2010 to put together a case of conspiracy against the Australian hacker and journalist for the dissemination of these secret documents with the help of a former soldier, Chelsea Manning, who worked as an intelligence analyst for the Department of Defense, in the theft of records.

For the UN, UK ”arbitrarily detained Assange, and possibly has endangered his life for the past seven years,“ the agency said in a statement on Callamard's conference.

The Ecuadorian government, which had granted him political asylum in his embassy in London under the then administration of Rafael Correa in 2012, claimed to have withdrawn the asylum in response to his discourteous and aggressive behavior.

During the government of the now president Lenin Moreno, rules of coexistence with Assange were established, and, according to the Latin American country, Assange broke them when the journalist meddled in matters of other states, according to Moreno through a video released on Thursday.

Assange had recently published information about the corruption scandal in Ecuador known as ”INA Papers”, related to the acquisition of property by the family of the president of the country with offshore companies.