Andean Group - June 2014 (ISSN 1741-4466)

Two years and counting. That is how long the founder of the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has been holed up in Ecuador’s embassy in London. In a joint press videoconference with Assange in Quito and London, Ecuador’s foreign minister, Ricardo Patiño, announced on 19 June that his government’s support for Assange would continue for “the whole of the mandate” of President Rafael Correa which concludes in 2017 (and presumably beyond if Correa succeeds in amending the constitution to allow for indefinite re-election).

Assange entered the Ecuadorean embassy in London on 19 June 2012. Soon afterwards Ecuador granted Assange ‘diplomatic asylum’ on humanitarian grounds, but Britain has refused to grant him safe conduct. The British police have carried out 24-hour vigilance of the embassy, which has apparently cost some UK£6m (US$10.2m) so far.

This time last year Patiño flew to London to meet his British peer William Hague to try and make progress on the standoff. Both men agreed at the time to create a working group. But Patiño conceded during the videoconference that this had completely failed to get off the ground. “There seems to be an impasse from a legal point of view. We could not agree on specific objectives for the group so we haven’t even formed the group a year later,” Patiño said.

Patiño also condemned “the resounding silence” of the newspapers Der Spiegel, Le Monde, El País, The New York Times and The Guardian, which all published material from WikiLeaks, such as compromising US diplomatic cables. Patiño said the papers had hung Assange out to dry.

Meanwhile, Assange told the videoconference that his lawyers had advised him that extradition to the US was still a “serious risk” if he gave up political asylum. Assange faces charges of sexual assault in Sweden but both he and the Ecuadorean government are convinced that he would face onward extradition to the US.

YASunidos fights on

The advocacy group YASunidos is refusing to give up the fight over the imminent exploitation of oil in Ecuador’s Yasuní nature reserve. On 18 June the lawyers for YASunidos, Julio César Trujillo and Pablo Piedra Vivar, presented an appeal to the contentious electoral tribunal (Tribunal Contencioso Electoral [TCE]) against the resolution of the national electoral council (CNE) that the group had failed to collect the requisite number of valid signatures to trigger a referendum over the extraction of oil in Yasuní. Piedra also revealed that Yasunidos had requested that the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) issue precautionary measures in favour of those who signed the petition.
A group of professors from the Escuela Politécnica Nacional (EPN) and the Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar (UASB) have claimed that the verification process carried out by the CNE of signatures calling for a referendum on the drilling was flawed. In a statistical analysis of the signatures presented by YASunidos, the professors concluded that 673,862 of the total of 757,623 were valid, which would have been enough to trigger a referendum.

The professors analysed a sample of 2,508 forms containing 20,064 signatures, using a computer programme to compare the names with identity numbers. They concluded that while some of the signatures were imperfect (‘failing to fulfil all of the formalities’) they were technically valid.

The reserves in the 1bn barrel Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oil field are expected to come on-stream from mid-2016.

• Murder rate

“After 20 or 25 years we have been able to reduce the murder rate to a single digit,” the interior minister, José Serrano, announced in mid-June. The murder rate fell to 3.7 per 100,000 inhabitants in the first five months of 2014, Serrano said. In January the interior ministry reported that the murder rate had been 10.87 per 100,000 in 2013, down from a record high of 18.88 in 2008, early in the mandate of President Rafael Correa. At the end of 2011 the Correa administration launched a citizen security initiative including security cameras, intelligence work, and a purge of the police force. Serrano said that 322 members of the police force had recently been fired for disciplinary reasons. Of these 126 face charges, ranging from drug-trafficking and murder to theft and extortion.