Putin Wants the Rights of Assange to Be Observed

Following the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange by British police upon request of the Ecuadorean government, Russian President Vladimir Putin voiced his concern over the situation. Asking for Assange's rights to be observed. 

Press secretary for the Russian Presidency, Dmitry Peskov told reporters that he currently can't make any detailed statements on the overall situation but stated that “We, of course, hope that all of his rights will be observed.”

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Other high ranking officials within the Russian government also voiced their concern and criticism over the arrest, which even experts of the UN argue are in violation of international law. 

Alexey Chepa, deputy chairman of the International Affairs Committee of the State Duma was quoted in the Moscow times, saying, "We need to use all international opportunities to protect the person who tried to expose the truth and bring information to the public that some entities carefully concealed.”

Also known for her fierce responses, Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova took to Facebook to criticize the arrest of Julian Assange. To her followers, she wrote: "The hand of "democracy" squeezes the throat of freedom."

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

Assange faces a maximum prison sentence of five years, the Justice Department said in a statement. The founder of WikiLeaks was arrested on Thursday by British police and evicted from the Ecuadorian embassy, after the South American country abruptly ended seven years of asylum, in a decision that his followers described as illegal.

In a statement to the public, Ecuadorean President Lenin Moreno said that Julian Assange was nothing more than "a miserable hacker."