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Assange Provokes New Diplomatic Scandal |
16 August 2012The British authorities are threatening to storm the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is hiding. Experts are predicting a loud international scandal.
Since last night, the British police have been besieging the high-rise building where the Ecuadorean Embassy is located on the second floor. The law enforcers are refraining from breaking into the embassy but all its doors are blocked. This means that the founder of the notorious WikiLeaks website Julian Assange will not be able to leave unnoticed from the embassy which has sheltered him. On the other hand, it seems that he will not be able to stay there indefinitely either. The British authorities have warned that if the Ecuadorean diplomats refuse to hand Assange over, the embassy will be stormed.
Meanwhile, Article 22 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations reads that the grounds of embassies are inviolable, international lawyer Paul Kalinichenko says:
“The grounds of embassies are under the jurisdiction of the state represented by this or that embassy. As a rule, the receiving country is not allowed to carry out any public actions towards any embassy. I believe that Ecuador is entitled to complain about violation of the Convention.”
However, the UK relies on its Diplomatic & Consular Premises Act of 1987, which allows the UK to revoke the diplomatic status of an embassy on UK soil in case the embassy’s grounds are ‘misused’. London assumes that Ecuador has no right to give shelter to Assange whom the UK has agreed to extradite to Sweden where he will face sexual assault charges. On his part, Assange declares that the charges are a farfetched pretext, while in fact the two countries are acting in collusion with the US which is accusing Assange of espionage for publishing secret information online.
Fearing for his life, Julian Assange applied for political asylum in Ecuador in June this year. A formal announcement on Assange’s bid will be issued today. Ecuador takes the UK’s threats to forcefully arrest Assange as an unfriendly and improper act, Ecuador’s Ambassador to Russia Patricio Chavez Zavala stressed:
“Ecuador will take this as an unfriendly, aggressive and unacceptable act. It means disrespect of our sovereignty and it would force us to respond. This is a very dangerous precedent which opens the door to any violation of diplomatic space.”
Former Russian Ambassador to Libya and Tunis Alexey Podtserob believes that there is a danger of a loud diplomatic scandal:
“When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, in spite of their defiance of international law, Nazi Germans did not make any attempts to storm our embassy in Berlin. Granting asylum on embassy grounds is a common practice. Lawyers argue whether this is legal but it has taken place many times. After the Hungarian uprising in 1956, one of the bishops who supported the rioters took shelter in an embassy and no one attempted to arrest him. Later it was agreed that he would leave the country. What the UK is threatening to do is a gross violation of international law.”
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the British Foreign Office has told journalists that forceful entry into the Ecuadorean Embassy could take place in a week; however, the British authorities are still committed to reaching a mutually acceptable solution. |
16 August 2012
Voice of Russia
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