Mexico's President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador welcomed the British court's rejection of the US request to extradite the 49-year-old Australian due to the risk of suicide, calling it a"triumph of justice."
"I'm going to ask the foreign minister to carry out the relevant procedures to request that the UK government releases Mr. Assange and that Mexico offers him political asylum," President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador told reporters on Monday. "Mexico has a long history of offering asylum," Adolfo Laborde, an academic and foreign relations expert, told AFP.
Assange is wanted on 18 charges in the United States relating to the 2010 release by WikiLeaks of 500,000 secret files detailing aspects of military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.Arturo Sarukhan, a former Mexican ambassador to the United States, said the asylum offer risked causing tensions with the incoming administration of US President-elect Joe Biden.