Hypocrisy Everywhere
After Ecuador decided to grant asylum to Julian Assange in their embassy in the UK, the Brits announced that all options were on the table: including storming the embassy to take Assange by force. Really, UK? Isn’t their embassy supposed to be territory of Ecuador by international law? Or does sovereignty have no meaning for the empire on which the sun was never supposed to set? Talking of which, did you think Ecuador did that to piss off the West? No, that wasn’t the only reason. They’ve done the same with Belarus in the past: in 2008, Ecuador granted refugee status to a Belarusian army captain, Barankov. Who then started a blog criticizing Belarus’s authoritarian ruler, Alexander Lukashenko, over corruption and other crimes. So is Ecuador the new America, the new “give me your persecuted” land? Not so fast. After a recent visit by Lukashenko to Ecuador, the Ecuadorians have started a court case to decide whether to extradite Barankov to Belarus! If Belarus is here, can Russia be ...