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Ecuador will deliver to the USA all the documents and objects that Assange left in the Embassy of London
Posted On 13 May 2019
Ecuadornews:
The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, on his arrival Thursday at the Court of Magistrates of Westminster in London (United Kingdom) after his arrest. The arrest on Thursday of Assange responded to a request for extradition from the US, as well as to the fact of violating the conditions of probation in 2012, Scotland Yard reported. EFE / Stringer
The Attorney General of the State of Ecuador has agreed to register one of the stays of its embassy in London, in which Julian Assange has resided during the last seven years, and to deliver to the USA all his documents, mobile phones, computer files, computers, units of memory, CD and any other device, as indicated by an official notification to which El País newspaper of Spain has had access.
The United States demands the extradition of Assange to the United Kingdom. A US court asks to judge the founder of Wikileaks, whom he accuses of a crime of computer intrusion punishable by up to five years in prison. In 2010 the Australian website leaked to the media 450,000 secret documents from thousands of internal US communications about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The activist was arrested on April 11 at the diplomatic headquarters of Ecuador and handed over to the British authorities.
The registration of Assange’s sealed room will take place on the 20th, within the framework of a rogatory commission (request for judicial assistance) from the US Department of Justice to Ecuador. The note states that it will be held at nine in the morning, London time, and that the seizure of the documents and personal files of the activist will be made by police captain Diego López and second sergeant Milton Jaque, expert in the section of computer forensics. The decision to intervene all Assange’s belongings has already been communicated to his lawyer in Ecuador, Carlos Poveda.
Julian Assange, 47, enjoyed the protection and support of the Ecuadorian Government during the time of President Rafael Correa. He was granted political asylum and was allowed to take refuge in his diplomatic legation in London after exhausting all judicial instances before which he appealed the decision to be extradited to Sweden. The justice of that country demanded it before the British authorities so that it responded to the accusation of two crimes against the sexual freedom.
The change of Government in Ecuador and the approach of that country to the US with Lenin Moreno has changed everything. He started by establishing a hard protocol of visits and living conditions of the activist in the embassy, allowed his detention on the 11th and now agrees to the registration of the Wikileaks founder’s room and the delivery to the USA of all the computer material.
Baltasar Garzón, Assange’s lawyer, describes the delivery to the US of the defendant’s belongings of “absolute violation of Ecuador’s asylum institution.” “It is incomprehensible that the country of protection now takes advantage of the privileged position of having welcomed it to remit its belongings to the country that pursues it. Belongings that will have been intervened without a court order, without protection of the rights of the asylee, without respect for the chain of custody, “said Garzón. “What is aggravated by the illicit recording mechanism that was deployed in the embassy and that has been denounced. The systematic violation of Assange’s rights is overcoming the limits of the imaginable, “he said.
The judicial cooperation of the current executive of Ecuador with the US began months ago. The Ecuadorian justice allowed the North American authorities to take a statement to the diplomatic staff of its embassy in London. In the framework of this collaboration, Assange’s lawyers do not rule out that recordings, audios and documents stolen from the activist and one of his lawyers in a supposed espionage operation have been sent to the US to provide information to the United States about his defense. Assange recently filed a complaint in the National Court against a Spanish journalist and four computer programmers for alleged extortion when trying to sell for three million euros hundreds of videos and documents of his last years in the embassy. The UN Special Rapporteur for Privacy also studies this alleged espionage.
Aitor Martínez, one of the lawyers of the Australian activist’s team, affirms that the initiative of Ecuador is “a manifest and radical violation of the right to defense, since in those documents and electronic devices are all communications with their lawyers and their legal documentation. A privileged material that will allow the US to build and create new charges for its request for extradition. “
The founder of Wilileaks has formally denied before a London court his consent to the request for extradition from the United States. Assange appeared by videoconference from prison before the Court of Magistrates of Westminster, where the process began on day 2. Days before, another British court sentenced him to 50 weeks in prison for having violated in 2012 the conditions of conditional release that had been imposed. (I)
