London/Quito - Ecuador granted political asylum to WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange on Thursday, a day after it said Britain had threatened to raid the Ecuadorean embassy in London to arrest the former hacker.
Britain has said it is determined to extradite him to Sweden, where he is accused of rape and sexual assault. Assange fears he will ultimately be sent to the United States which is furious that his WikiLeaks website has leaked hundreds of thousands of secret US diplomatic and military cables.
Ecuador's Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said his country feared for the safety of the Australian, who had lodged an asylum request with President Rafael Correa, a self-declared enemy of “corrupt” media and US “imperialism”.
Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague said that London would not allow Assange safe passage out of the country.
Patino told a news conference in Quito that Assange's extradition to a third country without proper guarantees was probable, and that legal evidence showed he would not get a fair trial if eventually transferred to the United States.
“This is a sovereign decision protected by international law. It makes no sense to surmise that this implies a breaking of relations (with Britain),” he said.
Even after Thursday's decision Assange's fate is still far from clear: Britain has said it could strip the Ecuadorean embassy of its diplomatic status, which would expose him to immediate arrest by the British authorities.
“The United Kingdom does not recognise the principle of diplomatic asylum,” Hague told reporters. “There is no threat here to storm the embassy. We are talking about an Act of Parliament in this country which stresses that it must be used in full conformity with international law.”
Hague said the impasse could go on for a considerable time.
Assange has been holed up inside Ecuador's embassy in central London for eight weeks since he lost a legal battle to avoid extradition to Sweden.
In a statement posted by WikiLeaks on its Twitter page, he said Ecuador's decision was “a historic victory”.
“It was not Britain or my home country, Australia, that stood up to protect me from persecution, but a courageous, independent Latin American nation.”
Britain has said it could use a little-known piece of legislation from 1987, introduced in the wake of the shooting of a British police officer outside the Libyan embassy in London, to remove the Ecuador embassy's diplomatic status.
The Ecuadorean government has bristled at the warning: its foreign minister said Britain was threatening Ecuador with a “hostile and intolerable act”, comparing the action to Iran's storming of Britain's Tehran embassy 2011.
“I don't think they will dare to infringe international law... Diplomatic headquarters cannot be broken into, we can't imagine that happening,” Patino told the state-run news website El Ciudadano after the announcement.
Outside the Ecuadorean embassy near London's famed Harrods department store, supporters relayed the announcement about his asylum request over a loudspeaker to cheers and clapping from protesters who had gathered outside the building.
Supporters shouted: “The people united will never be defeated!”, waving Ecuadorean flags and holding posters showing Assange's head, reading “no extradition”.
A Reuters reporter saw at least three protesters being dragged away by police after tussles with police before the decision was announced.
“I've lived, worked and travelled in places with proper dictatorships and nowhere have I seen violations of the Vienna convention to this extent,” said Farhan Rasheed, 42, a historian wearing an “I love Occupy” badge, outside the embassy.
“Here we have a government which claims to be a government of law and justice, stretching and possibly about to break a serious binding international agreement.”
It was unclear how long Assange could stay in the small embassy - housed on the ground floor of an apartment block - which is under 24-hour surveillance by British police.
His mother, Christine Assange, told Reuters her son was “geared up for the fight”.
“He knows that he's got justice and right on his side. He's done nothing wrong, nobody in the world has charged him,” she said. “We can't see what our next move is... All we can do is be on alert to the next shifty move they make.”
Britain's threat to withdraw diplomatic status from the Ecuadorean embassy also drew criticism from one of its own former diplomats. “I think the Foreign Office have slightly overreached themselves here,” Britain's former ambassador to Moscow, Tony Brenton, told the BBC.
“If we live in a world where governments can arbitrarily revoke immunity and go into embassies then the life of our diplomats and their ability to conduct normal business in places like Moscow where I was and North Korea becomes close to impossible.”
In Sweden, the Foreign Ministry said it was summoning Ecuador's ambassador after the decision to give Assange shelter.
Swedish prosecutors want to question Assange over accusations of rape and sexual assault made by two female former WikiLeaks supporters in August 2010 but have not yet charged him.
The lawyer for the two Swedish women who made the allegations said his clients deserved justice.
“It's an abuse of the asylum instrument, the purpose of which is to protect people from persecution and torture if sent back to one's country of origin,” Claes Borgstrom, the lawyer representing the two Swedish women, told Reuters.
“It's not about that here. He doesn't risk being handed over to the United States for torture or the death penalty. He should be brought to justice in Sweden. This is completely absurd.”
Assange says he fears Sweden could send him on to the United States. His supporters have said US authorities want to punish him for publishing diplomatic cables which laid bare Washington's power-brokering across the globe.
“The reaction he has is that he wants to underline that this (asylum) is a measure that is aimed at the US and not against Sweden,” said Per E Samuelsson, one of the lawyers representing Assange who talked to Assange after the decision.
“He has sought political asylum in order to eliminate the risk that he will spend the rest of his life in prison in the United States,” Samuelsson said.
Ecuador said it had tried to get assurances from Britain and Sweden that Assange could not be extradited to a third country but that no assurance was given. Under European law, neither Britain nor Sweden could extradite anyone to a country where they might face the death penalty. - Reuters