Five years after Julian Assange was accused of rape in Sweden, Ecuador said it has reached a deal that would allow him to be interrogated by Swedish officials at its embassy.
The WikiLeaks founder has been holed up at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London for more than three years to avoid extradition to Sweden, where prosecutors want to question him over the rape allegation.
Assange, an Australian, has not been charged and has denied the rape claim.
But on Thursday, Ecuador and Sweden reached an agreement “on legal assistance in criminal affairs as a result of the negotiations which started last June,” the Ecuadorian Foreign Affairs Ministry said.
“The agreement guarantees, among other things, the application and respect of the national legislation and principles of international rights, particularly those related to human rights, and the full exercise of national sovereignty, in any case of legal assistance between Ecuador and Sweden.”
As a result, the deal also facilitates Assange’s interrogation, the Ecuadorian ministry said.
The Foreign Affairs Ministry did not release any more details about Assange’s possible questioning.
Assange has said he fears Sweden would extradite him to the United States, where he could face the death penalty if he is charged and convicted of publishing government secrets through WikiLeaks.
Since WikiLeaks launched in 2006, it has published thousands of classified government documents, cables and videos.
In 2007, it posted procedures manual for Camp Delta, the U.S. detention center in Guantanamo Bay.
Three years after that, the site posted more than 90,000 classified documents related to the war in Afghanistan. It was described as the biggest leak since the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War.
Later that year, WikiLeaks published almost 400,000 classified military documents from the Iraq war, providing insights as to how many Iraqi civilians have been killed, the role that Iran has played in supporting Iraqi militants and many accounts of abuse by Iraqi’s army and police.