Assange Arrest 'National Shame' and 'Historic Error,' Ecuador’s Ex-Foreign Minister Says

Ecuador’s Former Foreign Minister Guillaume Long issued a statement Thursday condemning the arrest of Julian Assange from the Ecuadorean Embassy in the British capital London.

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Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been charged with "computer hacking conspiracy" in the United States, the country's justice department said Thursday hours after he was arrested by British police in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London where he had been seeking asylum since 2012.

“The surrender of Julian Assange, dragged by the British police after entering our diplomatic mission to remove it, is a national shame and a historic error that will leave a deep mark on Ecuador for a long time,” Long said.

Long further stressed that the country had violated the fundamental "non-refoulement" principle of human rights protection according to international law.

“Ecuador has just violated opinion 54/2015 of the Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions of the United Nations,” and “violated Opinion OC-25/2019 of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and Resolution MC-54-19 of the IACHR of March 2019, which obliges Ecuador not to deport, return, expel, extradite or otherwise remove Assange from our embassy,” he specified.

U.S. prosecutors filed conspiracy charges against Assange for trying to access U.S. government computers containing classified information in 2010, along with former military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning.

In 2018, Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno described Assange as an “inherited problem,” and cut off his access to the outer world by stripping the asylee of internet access and banning visitors not part of his legal team.

“This decision will obviously bring a lot of legal tail for the Ecuadorian State," the former foreign minister concluded. “Beyond that, it will be remembered by future generations of Ecuadorians and Ecuadorians as an act of servility, vileness and ethical degradation of political power in our country.”