MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Julian Assange's Ecuadorean nationality revoked by a court

Assange spent almost seven years at the Ecuadorean embassy in London under the status of political refugee

An administrative court in Ecuador revoked the country's nationality of Wikileaks founder, Australian-born Julian Assange. The Monday 26 July ruling was notified to Assange's attorney Carlos Poveda and the Ecuadorean foreign ministry.

 The Ecuadorean foreign ministry started the demand because of reiterated administrative failures in complying with the citizenship procedure at the end of 2017, during the presidency of Conservative Lenin Moreno and foreign minister Maria Fernanda Espinosa.

Poveda questioned the procedure and the open audience of last week complaining of, “only 20 minutes to decide and read a sentence annulling naturalization papers of Assange with no valuing of evidence or validity”

The attorney anticipated that since Assange's right to defense was curtailed, the case will be appealed. He added that it was a first ruling from a lower court and the case could be made to reach Ecuador's Supreme Court.

Assange spent almost seven years at the Ecuadorean embassy in London under the status of political refugee. In 2019 the government of president Lenin Moreno withdrew his diplomatic asylum for “repeated violations of international conventions and cohabitation protocol” and handed him over to Scotland Yard.

January this year UK justice rejected the Assange extradition request from the US for publishing millions of documents involving the national security of Washington.

Assange is currently complying with a fifty weeks in a UK jail for having violated his liberty on parole, when back in 2012 he took refuge at the Ecuadorean embassy in London so as not to be extradited to Sweden on alleged accusations of sexual aggression and rape which were later dropped.