From embassy to jail cell: Assange’s legal plight

After 2,487 days ensconced in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange faces an uncertain fate following his surprise arrest on Thursday.

Here is a brief guide to his legal predicament.

Assange was arrested in unusual circumstances, with plain-clothes police entering the embassy and hustling him out.

WikiLeaks said the officers entered at the invitation of the Ecuadoran ambassador.

The 1961 Vienna Convention on diplomatic relations states that security forces can enter a foreign embassy with the head of the mission’s consent.

Ecuador had accused Assange of breaching the terms of his asylum agreement.

British police said there were two grounds for his arrest: a UK warrant against Assange for breaching the terms of his bail in 2012, and a US extradition demand.

The United States heads the queue of countries chasing Assange with its assertion that WikiLeaks’ mass dumping of unredacted classified documents online in 2010 posed a threat to national security.

The US Department of Justice said Assange faces up to five years in jail on a federal charge of "conspiracy to commit computer intrusion for agreeing to break a password to a classified US government computer".

Assange also faces legal action in Britain for allegedly skipping bail in 2012 when he faced a UK extradition order.

That order was in response to accusations against him in Sweden.

The lawyer of the Swedish woman who accused him of rape in 2010 said she and her client would ask prosecutors there to reopen the investigation, which was dropped in 2017.

Assange could face up to six years’ jail on such a charge.

British authorities’ next moves against Assange will be closely watched.

Several British ministers have said that nobody is above the law.

Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno said he received a written British guarantee that London would not extradite Assange to a country that might torture him or seek the death penalty.

The United States applies the death penalty in both federal and state courts. Treason charges are punishable by death in times of war.

So far however, the only charge that the United States has announced against Assange is the hacking conspiracy case bearing a jail term.

WikiLeaks branded Ecuador’s withdrawal of Assange’s asylum illegal under international law.