Put Julian AssangeAssange under house arrest: UN

The WikiLeaks founder should be released from prison and moved to house arrest while fighting extradition, a UN expert has said.

Julian Assange has been held at the high-security Belmarsh prison in London since being evicted from the Ecuadorean embassy in 2019. Picture: AFP

Julian Assange should be released from prison and moved to house arrest while fighting extradition, a UN expert has said.

The WikiLeaks founder, 50, has been held at the high-security Belmarsh prison in southeast London since being evicted from the Ecuadorean embassy in the capital in April 2019.

He had spent seven years in the embassy to avoid extradition, leading to a £13m police surveillance operation.

Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, said the UK was breaching international law by keeping Assange in jail.

“We have a man locked up in solitary confinement in a high-­security prison who’s not violent, who’s not serving a sentence,” he said. “He should be free, perhaps with house arrest.”

Augusto Pinochet, the former Chilean dictator, spent 18 months under house arrest while successfully fighting extradition to Spain after his arrest in London in 1998.

“[Pinochet] was free to receive as many visitors as he wanted and have access to the public ... and that’s precisely, it seems to me, what the government wants to prevent because there is no legal basis for keeping Julian Assange in a high-security prison.”

Assange sought sanctuary in the Ecuadorean embassy to avoid extradition to Sweden on sexual assault charges, which he denied. Professor Melzer said two women who accused Assange of sexual assault in 2010 should “reassess” what had happened in light of ­Assange’s diagnosis while in prison of Asperger’s syndrome.

He told the Foreign Press ­Association in London that the “extremely restrictive con­ditions” at Belmarsh were “destroying” Assange’s health.

The professor of international law at Glasgow University said there had been an “incapacity of the British authorities at all levels to ensure humane treatment and due process of Julian Assange”.

Assange is wanted on charges of espionage and hacking. Last month, he was allowed to seek permission to appeal to the Supreme Court after the High Court overturned a block on his forced move to the US.

The Times