He’s cost the UK £13m... but UN says we should be paying him!
RAPE suspect Julian Assange should be compensated for his stay in Ecuador’s London embassy, a UN panel ruled yesterday.
The judgment that the WikiLeaks founder had been ‘arbitrarily detained’ – despite the fact he has been living in the embassy voluntarily – was immediately dismissed by Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond as ‘frankly ridiculous’.
The UN panel’s opinion is not legally binding, although Assange claimed it was and threatened to sue the Government for his ‘illegal, immoral and unethical detention’.
A European Arrest Warrant for him remains in place and can be enforced as soon as he steps out on to the street.
He had boasted that he would be a free man at noon yesterday, but by mid-afternoon he was still holed up in the embassy.
The Scotland Yard bill for police posted around the clock outside the building to stop him going on the run has soared to £12.6million. If he succeeds in claiming compensation from UK taxpayers, lawyers say he could win a ‘six-figure’ sum.
Clutching a copy of the UN panel’s ruling as he made a gloating 12-minute speech from the embassy balcony, Assange told supporters: ‘This is a victory that can’t be denied.’
The little-known UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which usually investigates countries with appalling human rights records, ruled that despite being free to come and go from the embassy, he had in effect been imprisoned there by the UK and Sweden because he would be arrested to face rape claims if he stepped outside.
Assange is wanted for questioning over an alleged rape in Sweden, which he denies. He fears being extradited from there to the US to be quizzed for leaking documents.
Even a member of the UN panel rejected its conclusions and said Assange had claimed political asylum in Ecuador’s embassy purely to ‘evade arrest’. Mr Hammond stressed that Assange was still a ‘fugitive from justice’.
The panel urged Britain to end his ‘deprivation of liberty’ more than three years after
‘He is a fugitive
from justice’
the 44-year-old hacker holed himself up there in 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden.
The group said he had been ‘arbitrarily detained’ since his original arrest in 2010.
The panel, composed of academics, started looking at Assange’s case in 2014 after he said he was in effect being held against his will. Panel chairman Seong-Phil Hong said yesterday: ‘ The working group maintains that the arbitrary detention of Mr Assange should be brought to an end, that his physical integrity and freedom of movement be respected, and that he should be entitled to an enforceable right to compensation.’
But Mr Hammond said: ‘Julian Assange is a fugitive from justice. He can come out any time he chooses. This is frankly a ridiculous finding by the working group.’
In a strongly worded letter to the UN panel, Britain’s permanent representative to the world body, Julian Braithwaite, said the UK was ‘surprised and disappointed’.
Human rights minister Dominic Raab said: ‘Let’s face it, Sweden is not some tin-pot banana republic. It is a country with a wellrespected justice system. So, we don’t accept the opinion, he can forget about compensation, and frankly many people here will think this kind of nonsense undermines the credibility of the UN, which is not what we want.’
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