Poll finds most Britons reject UN panel finding on Julian Assange
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Version 0 of 1. Two in three Britons reject the finding of a UN panel that Julian Assange is being arbitrarily detained, according to a national opinion poll. Lawyers on the UN’s panel on arbitrary detention last week found that the WikiLeaks founder, 44, had been arbitrarily detained by the UK and Sweden for more than five years and should be released immediately with compensation. The panel’s findings, leaked last Thursday and published in full the following morning, were a welcome victory for Assange, but officials from both governments immediately rejected the decision. Now YouGov’s polling suggests that a majority of the British public supports Philip Hammond, the British foreign secretary, in his dismissal of the findings as “ridiculous” and “flawed in law”. According to the pollsters, 66% of British people agree with the statement that Assange has been “voluntarily avoiding lawful arrest by choosing to remain in the Ecuadorian embassy” since June 2012. Just 14% – fewer than one in six – of respondents said they agreed that Assange “had been deprived of his liberty for an unacceptable length of time”. One in five said they didn’t know. A majority of the UN’s working group on arbitrary detention, a panel of international lawyers, had found that Assange had been unlawfully detained by the British and Swedish governments since his first arrest in the UK on 7 December 2010 and subsequent detention in Wandsworth prison. Assange’s extradition had been sought by authorities in Sweden on allegations of rape and sexual misconduct dating back to mid-2010. However, when he exhausted all his possibilities of appeal against extradition, he sought asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy. He has denied the accusations against him and said he fears that if he was extradited to Sweden he would be further extradited to the US. It is believed that a secret grand jury investigation is preparing to charge him over publishing secret details of US diplomacy and the brutal methods used by its armed forces in the Iraq war. The US government under Barack Obama has already targeted a number of whistleblowers with espionage charges, including Chelsea Manning, the US army intelligence analyst who leaked millions of documents to WikiLeaks and is now serving a 35-year sentence. YouGov’s polling also found that the British public are increasingly negative towards Assange. His net favourability – the difference between favourable and unfavourable scores – has fallen from -11 in 2013 to -26 in 2016. Kristinn Hrafnsson, the WikiLeaks spokesman, said that UK public opinion had been shaped by attacks on Assange and the UN finding by officials and the press. He said: “The opinion is not surprising when the UK government calls the UN’s finding “ridiculous” and the press almost unanimously attacks it. The Guardian rejected it editorially on Friday morning, even before the UN arguments in the case where announced.” “What is surprising is that the determination to deprive Mr Assange of justice runs so deep, that parties are willing to undermine and attempt to destroy, the credibility of UN mechanisms, instrumental in international battle for human rights.” Meanwhile, the Swedish prosecutor heading a preliminary investigation into the rape allegation against Assange, Marianne Ny, has said she is preparing a new application to interview him at the Ecuadorian embassy. Ny said: “In relation to the report which was released last week, I can state that it does not change my earlier assessment in the preliminary investigation.” |