A police officer stands guard outside Ecuador's embassy in London on June 22
Public statements by United States officials saying the US wanted Julian Assange to be arrested are grounds for Sweden to repeal the WikiLeaks founder’s arrest warrant, his lawyer said on Wednesday.
Assange (45) has been holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London since 2012, after taking refuge there to avoid extradition to Sweden over allegations of rape, which he denies.
He fears Sweden would in turn hand him over to the US to face prosecution over the publication of thousands of classified military and diplomatic documents by WikiLeaks, in one of the largest information leaks in US history.
Lawyer Per Samuelson said the US had now openly said it wants to arrest Assange. “Given that the US is obviously hunting him now, he has to make use of his political asylum and it is Sweden’s duty to make sure that Sweden is no longer a reason for that fact he has to stay in the embassy,” Samuelson said.
“If they rescind the detention order, there is a possibility he can go to Ecuador and then he can use political asylum in an entire country.”
CIA director Mike Pompeo last month branded WikiLeaks a “hostile intelligence service”, and US attorney general Jeff Sessions said action was being taken against leaks of sensitive information. “Whenever a case can be made, we will seek to put some people in jail,” Sessions said.
US President Donald Trump and his administration have put heat on WikiLeaks after it embarrassed the CIA in March by releasing a large number of files and computer codes from the spy agency’s top-secret hacking operations.
The documents showed how the CIA exploits vulnerabilities in computer and networking hardware and software to gather intelligence.
Supporters of WikiLeaks say it is practising the constitutional right of freedom of speech and the press.
Samuelson said Sweden’s supreme court had previously rejected a similar request for the detention order to be torn up on the grounds that there was little chance that Assange would be handed over to the US.
“With the supreme court’s own reasoning, his detention should now be rescinded because we can now prove that the US is hunting Julian Assange,” he said. – Al Jazeera