500 Scholars, Activists, and Nobel Laureates Call on UK and Sweden to Free Assange

More than 500 high-profile activists, Nobel Peace Prize winners, academics, artists and human rights organizations released an open letter on Tuesday accusing Sweden and the United Kingdom of undermining the United Nations by continuing their “arbitrary detention” of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The letter was delivered to the Swedish and UK permanent representatives at the convening of the 31st United Nations Human Rights Council meeting in Geneva on Tuesday. It was published in response to a ruling, issued by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention last month, that Assange had been arbitrarily detained for more than three years and should be freed and compensated.

Those findings had been dismissed by UK foreign secretary Philip Hammond as “ridiculous” and “flawed,” while a number of senior British attorneys argued that the UN report was “not binding on the UK courts,” the Guardian reports.