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Assange signed a commitment for not making opinions on other countries
Posted On 23 Jan 2018
Ecuadornews:
The president of Ecuador Lenin Moreno, assured that WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, who remains asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for several years, recently signed a commitment not to return to review domestic policy issues of other states.
“He signed an agreement in the last month that he will not intervene in Ecuadorian politics or in the politics of other countries,” Moreno said in a televised interview.
That commitment, he said, is related to the asylum rules that Assange must meet, asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since July 2012.
In addition, the president said that the stay of the Australian journalist in the diplomatic legation in the United Kingdom is “a problem” inherited from the government of his predecessor, Rafael Correa, who granted him asylum on humanitarian grounds.
To try to solve that problem, Moreno asked his foreign minister, Maria Fernanda Espinosa, to seek a solution in freedom and said that the minister chose to give Ecuadorian citizenship to Assange, as well as a diplomatic rank, as an attempt to get him out of his siege at the embassy.
According to Moreno, the Australian journalist met the requirements to obtain Ecuadorian citizenship and said that what Ecuador was looking for was to get rid of “the problem definitively”.
“The problem is still latent,” Moreno added, but said that his Foreign Ministry “is opting for another way of doing things” in this matter, and that “mediation of important people is going to be requested,” which will be announced soon. .
The Ecuadorian Government hopes that in the short term there will be “a positive result” on this issue that “definitely causes us an inconvenience,” Moreno said.
Assange has been taking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, under asylum, since 2012, when Quito considers that his life was in danger after being required by the Swedish Justice for alleged sex crimes.
Although last May Sweden withdrew the charges, Ecuador still considers that Assange could be extradited to the US, where a lawsuit is demanded for espionage and treason following his publications in WikiLeaks.
The Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry has asked the United Kingdom to guarantee its safe exit to Ecuador to grant him asylum in the country, although London refuses to do so. (I)
