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U.N. Panel Rules That Julian Assange Should Be Allowed To Go Free

By R. Siva Kumar | Update Date: Feb 07, 2016 06:02 PM EST

Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, needs permission to move away from the embassy and get paid for his "deprivation of liberty," said a United Nations legal panel, the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD)

It discovered that he had been initially detained in Wandsworth prison, then put under house arrest and finally confined at the Ecuadorian Embassy. Moreover, holding him was found to be arbitrary as "he was held in isolation during the first stage of detention," as well as a "lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor in its investigations." It hence made him get detained for a long period.

However, the U.K. Foreign Office ruled that the report "changes nothing" and it wanted to "formally contest the working group's opinion."

Calling the panel "ridiculous", Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, explained that he was a "fugitive of justice." The Met Police said that they will still create "every effort" to detain him if he tries to move away from the embassy, explains BBC News.

Having been slapped with charges of sexual assault for the past six years, Julian Assange has continuously denied the allegations and has firmly insisted that they were "consensual."

He has since been trying to get asylum at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London in order to prevent getting extradited to Sweden.

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