LONDON (AP) — More than 70 British lawmakers have urged the government to make sure that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange faces Swedish justice if prosecutors there reopen a rape allegation against him.
1 / 3Police bundle WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, center right, from the Ecuadorian embassy into a police van in London after he was arrested by officers from the Metropolitan Police and taken into custody Thursday April 11, 2019. Police in London arrested WikiLeaks founder Assange at the Ecuadorean embassy Thursday for failing to surrender to the court in 2012, shortly after the South American nation revoked his asylum.
He was arrested Thursday after Ecuador withdrew his asylum. Assange is now in Belmarsh Prison in southeast London, waiting to be sentenced for jumping bail in Britain and facing an extradition request from the United States on charges of conspiring to break into a Pentagon computer. Most of the lawmakers who signed the letter are from the opposition Labour Party, whose leader, Jeremy Corbyn, wants Britain to refuse to send Assange to the U.S. After Assange's arrest, Corbyn praised him for exposing U.S. atrocities committed in Iraq and Afghanistan when WikiLeaks released tens of thousands of confidential U.S. documents in 2010.
British politicians are free to lobby the government for a certain course of action, but it's up to the courts to decide whether the U.S. request for Assange's extradition — and a possible future request from Sweden — should be honored. When he took up residence inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in 2012, it was to avoid answering the sexual allegations against him in Sweden, which had sought his extradition for questioning. He also sought refuge because of fears that Sweden would ultimately extradite him to the U.S.
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