Ecuador on Wednesday said it had stopped Julian Assange’s ability to communicate with the outside world from its London embassy, where the WikiLeaks frontman has been holed up since 2012.
The decision was taken because the Australian had broken a promise made last year to not interfere in other nations’ affairs while in the mission, an Ecuadoran government statement said without elaborating.
Under that deal, Assange had pledged “to not send messages that could be seen as interference in relations with other countries,” the statement said, adding that it could take other unspecified measures if he persisted.
The move to cut off Assange came after he used Twitter on Monday to challenge Britain’s accusation that Russia was responsible for the March 4 nerve agent poisoning of a Russian former double agent in the English city of Salisbury.
Assange also questioned the decision by Britain and more than 20 nations to retaliate against the poisoning by expelling Russian diplomats deemed spies.
The comments prompted a British Minister of State for Europe and the Americas Alan Duncan to brand Assange a “miserable little worm” who should leave the embassy and turn himself over to the British authorities.
In another tweetstorm on Tuesday, Assange attacked the arrest in Germany of former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont under an EU warrant issued by Spain over Puigdemont’s failed bid last year to declare independence for his region.
Assange’s “behavior, with his messages on social networks, puts at risk our good relations” with Britain and the EU, the Ecuadoran government text said.
Assange, 46, has spent much of his time in his small room in the embassy tweeting and at times contributing to RT, a Russian state-owned TV channel that broadcasts Kremlin messaging, as well as taking part in media conferences via video links.
In 2016, Ecuador briefly suspended his Internet connection for posting documents online that were seen as having an impact on the US presidential election.
In May last year, Ecuadoran President Lenin Moreno asked Assange to refrain from commenting on the separatist crisis in Catalonia region, after he tweeted that Madrid was guilty of “repression.”
Simon Bolivar Andean University analyst Michel Levi said he believed the decision to render Assange incommunicado “isn’t a change of policy in terms of his asylum, but rather to keep him to his conditions” of staying in the embassy.
Assange took refuge in the embassy in 2012 after a British judge ruled he should be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual assault.
Assange claims the accusations were politically motivated.
Ecuadoran Minister of Foreign Affairs Maria Fernanda Espinosa on Wednesday said that a delegation would meet with Assange’s lawyers in London next week “to explore what alternatives” existed to have Assange be able to leave the embassy.
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