ECUADOR says it’s ready to set a date for Swedish prosecutors to question Australian Julian Assange inside its London embassy – a potential breakthrough in the years-long global impasse over the WikiLeaks founder.
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Assange has previously offered to be questioned inside the embassy, but prosecutors had insisted until a year ago that he be interviewed in Sweden.
Last year, Ecuador said it agreed to a Swedish proposal to interview Assange at the embassy and in a statement Wednesday, the government said that a date for Assange to be questioned would soon be set.
Assange, 45, sought refuge in the Ecuadoran embassy in London in June 2012 after exhausting all his legal options in Britain against extradition to Sweden.
“It means that a questioning can make the case go forward”, Rosander told The Associated Press.
Mr Assange is wanted for questioning over a sex allegation, which he has always denied, and points out that the UK government has refused to guarantee that he will not be extradited to the United States to be quizzed over the activities of WikiLeaks if he leaves the embassy.
Those sexual assault allegations nearly got him extradited to Sweden in 2012, but after losing an appeal, he found asylum in London’s Ecuadorian embassy. Ecuador in the past has said it does not want to interfere with Sweden’s rape investigation.
“The prosecutor has requested permission to carry out an interrogation, so it is of course good for the investigation if it can be held”, Karin Rosander, spokeswoman for the Swedish Prosecution Authority, adding that the exact date of the interview has not yet been pinned down. He was accused of a 2010 rape in the country.
Assange’s defence team said in a statement that it welcomed the steps to take the WikiLeaks founder’s statement, which it said “comes after six years of complete inaction on the part of the Swedish prosecutor”.
He says he fears that if he is sent to Sweden, he will then be shipped to the United States, where he could be charged with espionage offenses.
Assange faces arrest by British police if he leaves the building and, with the exception of occasional trips to the embassy balcony, has not been outside for years.
But a UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention in February ruled in a non-binding decision that Assange’s confinement in the Ecuadoran embassy amounted to arbitrary detention by Sweden and Britain.
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In February, a United Nations panel determined that Assange was being arbitrarily detained in the Ecuadorean embassy and should go free – a conclusion dismissed by Sweden and the U.K., as we reported at the time.
