Assange asks U.K. court to drop arrest warrant

LONDON — Lawyers for the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange asked a British judge to drop a 2012 arrest warrant, a request that if granted could allow Assange to leave the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been living for 5 ½ years, and to fly to Ecuador, which has granted him citizenship.

Assange, 46, was ordered extradited to Sweden in February 2011 to face a charge of rape, which he denied. After his challenges to the extradition order were refused, he skipped bail and fled to the embassy in June 2012. He was granted asylum two months later and has remained at the embassy ever since.

Assange feared that Sweden would turn him over to the United States to face prosecution over WikiLeaks’ publication of troves of classified government documents on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, classified diplomatic cables and electronic hacking by the CIA, among other subjects.

Sweden dropped the rape inquiry in May, and withdrew the European arrest warrant it had requested. But the British authorities insist that Assange could still be arrested, for bail violations, if he leaves the embassy.

On Friday, Assange’s lawyer, Mark Summers, told Westminster Court that Sweden’s withdrawal of a European arrest warrant meant the British arrest warrant for violating bail no longer applied. Crown Aaron Watkins asked the court to deny the request. He said it could not be in public interest for Assange “not to be arrested or punished for his failure to surrender and for his contempt for the court process.”