WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been arrested by the Metropolitan Police, putting an end to his nearly seven-year stay inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Here’s everything you need to know about Assange’s arrest, how he ended up in the Ecuadorian embassy and what might happen next.
What just happened?
On April 11, 2019, the Metropolitan Police Service entered the Ecuadorian embassy and arrested Julian Assange for failing to surrender to the court – also known as skipping bail. He was immediately taken into police custody in central London and from there arraigned before Westminster Magistrates Court.
This is exactly the kind of situation that Assange had been hoping to avoid by taking refuge in the embassy. Although the arrest warrant has been active since June 2012, police are not permitted to enter a country’s foreign embassy without the ambassador’s express permission. Until now, Ecuador's refusal to grant that permission had effectively sheltered Assange from arrest.
A couple of hours after Assange was arrested late on Thursday morning, the Metropolitan Police released another statement saying that the WikiLeaks founder had been “further arrested on behalf of the United States authorities”. At the same time, the US Department of Justice announced that Assange had been charged with conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, alleging that he helped the former intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a password stored on US Department of Defense computers. If convicted, Assange faces a maximum sentence of five years.
Why now?
Assange was granted asylum status by the Ecuadorian government in August 2012, two months after he entered the embassy. But shortly before Assange’s arrest, today, the country revoked that status. In a video posted to Twitter, Ecuador’s president Lenín Moreno explained that his government withdrew asylum because of Assange’s “discourteous and aggressive behaviour,” “transgression of international treaties” and WikiLeak’s threats against Ecuador.
“[Assange] particularly violated the norm of not intervening in the internal affairs of other states,” Moreno said in the video, citing the leaking of Vatican documents in January 2019 by WikiLeaks. The president also said that Assange had violated the rules set by the Ecuadorian government for his stay in the embassy.
But the arrest warrant, issued by Westminster’s Magistrates' Court, dates all the way back to June 29, 2012. Assange had been facing a European arrest warrant ordered by Sweden so he could face rape charges, which he denied. After failing to challenge the extradition order, Assange skipped bail in the UK and sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy.
Although Swedish prosecutors dropped their preliminary investigations into the rape allegations in May 2017, the UK arrest warrant for skipping bail still stands. It is on the grounds of this warrant, as well as because of the US charges, that Assange was arrested.
What did Julian Assange do?
In August 2010, the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office issued an arrest warrant for Assange in relation to two separate allegations, one of rape and one of molestation. Assange refused to return to Sweden despite a ruling by the UK Supreme Court in May 2012 that said that he should be extradited to face questioning over the allegations.
On Twitter, Elisabeth Massi Fritz, the lawyer acting on behalf of the complainant behind the rape allegations against Assange, said that she will seek to re-open the police investigation into him. “No rape victim should have to wait 9 years to see justice be served,” she wrote.
Assange has protested that if he is extradited to Sweden, he will then be extradited to the US to face charges over his involvement in the Chelsea Manning leaks. In 2010, WikiLeaks published nearly 750,000 classified US documents, including the Iraq War Logs which detailed the number of civilian deaths during the Iraq war.
Will he be extradited?
Although the US has requested Assange's extradition, there is still a lengthy legal process to go through before his extradition is either carried out or denied. Assange's next court appearance concerning his extradition is slated for May 2.
In order to allow an extradition, a court must agree that there are no circumstances present that would prevent the extradition. In February 2018, Laurie Love, a British citizen accused of hacking into US government computers, won a High Court appeal against his extradition to the US because a judge ruled that extradition would put Love's health seriously at risk.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
