Ecuador Granted Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange Political Asylum

The foreign ministry of Ecuador announced that Ecuador would be granting Wikileaks co-founder Julian Assange a political asylum on 16 August 2012. This decision will help Assange shield from being extradited from Britain to Sweden, where he is facing charges of rape and sexual molestation.

Ecuador  officially the Republic of Ecuador is a Representative democratic republic in South America, it is bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and by the Pacific Ocean to the west.

In June 2012, Assange sought shelter in the Ecuadorian embassy in Britain after filing a petition seeking asylum from being extradited to Sweden.  Assange claims that the accusations are a device of getting him to the US authorities so he could be indicted for divulging State secretes.

Following this, Ecuador requested the British government to grant the embassy permission to fly Assange to Ecuador, but the British authorities have declined any such permission as of now. This decision taken by the British government hasn’t gone down well with Ecuador and both the nations have started a war of words on the social networking site called Twitter.

Assange shot to fame in the year 2010 after he leaked a number of US diplomatic cables and videos regarding the war in Iraq and Afghanistan through Wikileaks. Following the incident, USA and other countries whose secrets were divulged jumped into considerable action. Assange and his team argue that the alleged sex crimes allegations and these accusations are untrue and falsely built up.