Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Ecuador offers assylum to Assange

The vice-chancellor of Ecuador, Jacinto Lucas, declared that his country would set course to a hypothetical asylum request by persecuted founder of Wikileaks, J. Assange, against whom an Interpol notice has been issued irregularly (as there is no country yet where he has been charged for anything). (Source: Tercera Información[es])

He would not be the first person persecuted by the every day more totalitarian USA which finds asylum in  Latin America. This is also the case of persecuted Ground Zero videographer Kurt Sonnefeld who had to find refuge in Argentina after he revealed he had incriminating evidence against the USA in th 9/11 self-attack.

[Update: Al Jazeera reports that President Correa has rebutted his minister Lucas on this matter, saying that his offer has not yet been approved by either the Foreign Minister Ricardo Patiño or the President]

It is becoming difficult to obtain the raw information anymore, as Wikileaks is being subject to a sustained DDOS attack and the five media which have been privileged with advance knowledge of the cables are not publishing them properly (that is at least the case with The Guardian, which I early used as reference).

However I must mention here the cable from the Tegucigalpa (Honduras) embassy where it is set clear that the 2009 coup was a clear coup (totally illegitimate in motivation and procedure). You can read an Spanish translation at La Haine.

Update: Wikileaks is now more or less reachable. The Tegucigalpa embassy document I mentioned above can be read here in the original English version. Excerpt:

4. (C) In our view, none of the above arguments has any 
substantive validity under the Honduran constitution.  Some 
are outright false.  Others are mere supposition or ex-post 
rationalizations of a patently illegal act.  Essentially: 
 
-- the military had no authority to remove Zelaya from the 
country; 
 
-- Congress has no constitutional authority to remove a 
Honduran president; 
 
-- Congress and the judiciary removed Zelaya on the basis 
of a hasty, ad-hoc, extralegal, secret, 48-hour process; 
 
-- the purported "resignation" letter was a fabrication and 
was not even the basis for Congress's action of June 28; 
and 
 
-- Zelaya's arrest and forced removal from the country 
violated multiple constitutional guarantees, including the 
prohibition on expatriation, presumption of innocence and 
right to due process. 

No comments:

Post a Comment

Please, be reasonably respectful when making comments. I do not tolerate in particular sexism, racism nor homophobia. The author reserves the right to delete any abusive comment.

Comment moderation before publishing is... ON