Ecuador Grants Diplomatic Asylum to Wikileaks' Assange

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been granted diplomatic asylum by Ecuador. For the past two months, Assange has been sheltered in the Ecuador Embassy in London.
Assange apparently won asylum because of his allegations that he would face persecution if extradited from Great Britain to Sweden. His expressed fear is that a closed United States federal court indictment awaits him nd that if he is taken to Sweden he would then extradited to the US, where, depending on the charges brought against him, he could face the death penalty - if he were convicted of treason in time of war, for example.
Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa has said that he is sympathetic to what Assange stands for and that he was in favor of granting Assange asylum. So, it would have been difficult for him to refuse diplomatic asylum without losing face.
Correa, a leftist economist, has vilified the United States with his allies in the region and elsewhere - Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Bolvia's Evo Morales, Cuba's Fidel Castro and Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
As far as angering Great Britain is concerned, Correa has shown he is not embarrassed to do that. In February, Correa called for sanctions against Britain for its long-running dispute with Argentina over who owns the Falkland Islands.
In addition, Ecuador’s presidential elections are scheduled for next February and giving Assange asylum could be useful to Correa’s leftist image, making his chances of re-election even more likely.
Correa seems to like disclosure when it suits him, as in the case of Assange and Wikileaks, but he has a reputation of cracking down on journalists, with defamation complaints against journalists, pre-empted TV programming and temporary shutdowns of some stations.
Assange, too, purports to support freedom of the press but his broadcasts are apparently financed by a network financed by the Kremlin, and we all know of President Putin’s great respect for freedom of the press.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has said that the United States Justice Department has an "active, ongoing criminal investigation" into the WikiLeaks disclosure of classified U.S. diplomatic documents. Holder did not comment about the existence of a US indictment.
Great Britain is not pleased with Ecuador’s decision and has said that it will not allow Assange to leave the Embassy in order to board a diplomatic plane bound for Ecuador. British Foreign Minister William Hague denied, however, that the British government ever threatened to storm the Ecuador Embassy and take Assange into custody. This would violate international treaties concerning embassies. In the event, Britain would not want to put its own foreign embassies in jeopardy by storming the Ecuadorian Embassy in Britain. The stakes in the Assange affair are simply too insignificant for such an extraordinary move.
The British government has reiterated its commitment to send Assange to Sweden to face questioning on sex crimes charges.
Assange’s choices are few for the moment. While diplomatic treaties make foreign embassies the territory of the country which they represent, Assange cannot leave the Embassy by diplomatic car because the Ecuador Embassy occupies only part of a building and has no interior parking facility where Assange could enter a diplomatic car without first touching British soil and being arrested.
Where would the diplomatic car go, anyway? To a British airport, with the same problem facing Assange. He could not get out of the diplomatic car and into an Ecuadorian diplomatic plane without touching British soil and being stopped and arrested.
So, Julian Assange has diplomatic asylum but will have to stay inside the Ecuador Embassy in London. The British have the building under surveillance and will act if he steps outside the Embassy.
It could be a long and tiresome affair for everyone.
Diplomatic efforts must reach an agreement that will save everyone’s face, while at the same time satisfying Great Britain and the United States that their legitimate disagreements with Assange are not abandoned in the process.