Ecuador open to negotiating with Britain on Assange

ECUADOR’S FOREIGN minister said yesterday his country is open to a negotiated solution to the stand-off with Britain over the fate of Julian Assange.

But Ricardo Patiño warned if the diplomatic stand-off continues his government could take the dispute to international arbitration.

“We would prefer to continue working on dialogue with Great Britain,” he said in an interview broadcast on Ecuadorean television. “Turning to the Court of International Justice in The Hague is the path which would remain to us afterwards.”

The minister said his government still considered the diplomatic status of its embassy in London under threat, following last week’s official warning from the British authorities that it could be revoked to allow police into the building to arrest Mr Assange.

The WikiLeaks founder entered the embassy in June to avoid extradition to Sweden to face accusations of sexual assault against two women.

“We have received this communication and we have not received a withdrawal of same,” said Mr Patiño of the British warning.

The British government is refusing to provide Mr Assange safe passage to travel to Ecuador, which last Thursday granted him diplomatic asylum, having accepted his argument that he risked being extradited to the United States to face charges over his publication of secret US diplomatic cables.

The prospect of Ecuador turning to international courts follows strong backing for the country’s stance from South America’s 12-member regional body Unasur. A meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers on Sunday expressed “solidarity and support with Ecuador’s government before the threat to violate the site of its diplomatic mission”.

In a communique, the bloc said the principles of international law did not allow states to invoke national laws as a means of violating international obligations. Britain said it could use the 1987 Diplomatic and Consular Premises Act to justify revoking the immunity of Ecuador’s embassy.

The meeting also recognised the sovereign right of a state to concede asylum. The strong backing was unanimous and included Colombia, the US’s closest ally on the continent, with whom Ecuador has often had tense relations in the past.

“The Geneva Convention must be respected. We believe a country cannot simply [decide] not to comply with the requirements of this universal norm,” said María Ángela Holguín, Colombia’s foreign minister.

Ecuador’s diplomatic efforts will now focus on Friday’s meeting of foreign ministers at the Organisation of American States (OAS) in Washington, where the US and Canada are set to oppose the efforts of left-wing nations to have the hemisphere-wide body come out in support of Ecuador.

Ecuador and other left-wing countries in Latin America have become increasingly critical of the OAS in recent years for its supposed US bias and its decades-long suspension of communist Cuba.

Setting the scene for a possible showdown with the US, Mr Patiño spoke of the “limitations” of the OAS but expressed the hope that given the threat against a member state “it is indispensable that there is a reaction not for us but for the OAS, that it stand by a country that is being threatened”.