Latin American nations rally to take a stand against Britain on Assange case

ECUADOR has broadened the diplomatic brawl over Julian Assange by calling a meeting of 12 Latin American nations.

ECUADOR has broadened the diplomatic brawl over Julian Assange by calling a meeting of 12 Latin American nations to recruit support against Britain in the dispute over the WikiLeaks founder.

The Peruvian Foreign Ministry said yesterday that an extraordinary meeting of the Union of South American Nations, a regional grouping modelled on the EU, would be held tomorrow to consider the Assange affair.

Ecuador's decision to grant political asylum to the 41-year-old Australian, who is holed up in its London embassy, has cast it into an unusually bitter conflict with Britain, Sweden and the US.

Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino said Australia had abrogated its responsibility to protect Mr Assange's human rights and claimed the legal systems of Sweden, Britain and the US were unfair and could ultimately threaten Mr Assange's life.

However, the Swedish ambassador to Canberra, Sven-Olof Petersson, said yesterday Mr Assange would not be handed over to the US in the event of his extradition from Britain to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over sexual assault allegations. Swedish law forbids extradition in cases where there is a risk of execution, Mr Petersson told The Weekend Australian.

Using unusually blunt language, he accused the Ecuadorian ambassador in Stockholm of being "asleep at his post" by failing to make clear to his superiors Sweden's strict rules on extradition.

"He should have known that we never extradite anybody who might run the risk of being executed," Mr Petersson said. "On top of that, we don't extradite people who've argued to having committed military crimes or crimes that could be considered political.

"I would like to remind you, we still have a number of Americans who came to Sweden during the Vietnam War to ask to stay and they still cannot return to the US."

A spokesman for Foreign Minister Bob Carr said while the government was not seeking a diplomatic row with Ecuador, the idea that Australia had not been there for Mr Assange was just wrong. "To suggest he hasn't received consular assistance or that he has been abandoned is just wrong."

Mr Assange hailed Ecuador's intervention as a victory against the US, which he says is orchestrating his extradition to Sweden in the hope that it would send him to the US to be charged over WikiLeaks' publication of confidential US documents.

"It was not Britain or my home country, Australia, that stood up to protect me from persecution, but a courageous, independent, Latin American nation," he said.

"While today is a historic victory, our struggles have just begun. The unprecedented US investigation against WikiLeaks must be stopped."

Ecuador's government has a much worse record than Sweden on human rights and legal procedures, according to international human rights groups, and Stockholm said the Latin American country had no right to involve itself in a criminal extradition matter between two European states.

Ecuador stepped into the legal battle over Mr Assange after its President, Rafael Correa, was interviewed by the WikiLeaks founder on a Kremlin-supporting television station funded by the government of Vladimir Putin.

After losing his last appeal against extradition in the British court system, Mr Assange broke bail conditions eight weeks ago by fleeing to Ecuador's embassy, relying on its diplomatic immunity to stop police entering to arrest him.

British police stepped up their presence outside the embassy yesterday, arresting three people during a noisy protest by dozens of Assange supporters.

The British government warned yesterday that Ecuador's granting of asylum to Mr Assange would not succeed in preventing his extradition to Sweden, vowing that Scotland Yard police would arrest him the moment he stepped outside the embassy.

Foreign Secretary William Hague downplayed an earlier threat by the Foreign Office to revoke the embassy's diplomatic status, which would let police go into the building and arrest him.