Interview with Vladimir Putin

Putin slams UK hypocrisy over Assange

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused the British government of hypocrisy over the order to extradite WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange to Sweden to face questioning over the sex assault claims, arguing that the case seems to be “political”.

Press TV,

6 September, 2012

Interviewing with the RT news channel, he said that the decision of the judicial system in Britain concerning Assange’s extradition to the North European country clearly shows the UK government’s “double standards”.

“As far as I know, Ecuador asked Sweden for guarantees that Assange will not be extradited from Sweden to the United States. It has received no such guarantees. Of course, this leads one to think that this is a political case,” Putin said.

After the Ecuadorian government granted Assange political asylum on August 16, Britain vowed to prevent the 41-year-old Australian activist leave the country, insisting that it would still move to extradite him to Sweden. However, it is believed that Assange’s extradition to the North European country is a cover for sending him to the US, where the WikiLeaks revelation of the US diplomatic cables created massive embarrassment for Washington in 2010.

Meanwhile, in a meeting with foreign journalists in Spain’s capital Madrid, Assange's lawyer Baltazar Garzon said that based on information he obtained from people who have testified in the probe of Bradley Manning, US prosecutors have secretly launched an investigation into Assange and WikiLeaks.

Following the release of hundreds of thousands of classified US documents by the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, Bradley Manning, a US army soldier, was arrested in Iraq over the suspicion that he had passed the information to Assange.

“The procedure [against Assange] exists. We are going to ask US authorities to tell us if they have launched a procedure against WikiLeaks that affects Julian Assange,” Garzon said.

Earlier this month, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov condemned British officials’ threats to storm the Ecuadorian embassy in London as unlawful and urged the UK government to respect Assange’s rights as a political refugee.

Lecturing students and professors of Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO), which is affiliated with the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lavrov said that under international laws, it would be illegal for the UK police to raid the South American country’s diplomatic mission in the UK capital, where the WikiLeaks founder has taken refuge for more than two months.

Meanwhile, backtracking on the UK government’s intransigence on the issue of Assange, British Foreign Secretary William Hague called for a diplomatic solution to the stand-off with Ecuador over the activist in a written statement to the House of Commons on September 3.

Two days later on Wednesday September 5, in response to UK’s request, Ecuadorian Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said his government would resume talks with Britain this week over the fate of the WikiLeaks founder.

Here is the RT interview with Vladimir Putin