Lawyers for Julian Assange on Monday requested that a Swedish Court overturn an arrest warrant the court had issued against Assange. The request follows a report released by the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the United Nations (UN) [official website] that found [press release] Assange’s three-and-a-half years in the Ecuadorian embassy amount to “arbitrary detention.” A spokesperson for Assange said that if investigations into the UN’s report “find that the standard[s] for arbitrary detention [are] met, we would expect his release and compensation.”

WIkiLeaks, and its founder Assange, have created significant controversy since the website began openly publishing government secrets. In May 2015, the Swedish Supreme Court rejected [JURIST report] an appeal by Assange seeking to overturn a 2010 arrest warrant for alleged sexual assault that was reissued [JURIST report] by a lower court in late 2014. The warrant requires Assange to leave the Ecuadorian embassy in London where he has found asylum and travel to Sweden in order to be questioned about the allegations. The WikiLeaks trials [JURIST op-ed] have also garnered much debate in the US. Last year US Army Major General Jeffery Buchanan upheld [JURIST report] Private Chelsea Manning’s conviction and prison sentence for turning over classified information to WikiLeaks. In September 2013 Manning filed for a presidential pardon of the 35-year sentence [JURIST reports] she received in August. The sentence came a month after she was found guilty [JURIST report] of violating the Espionage Act but was acquitted of the more serious charge of “aiding the enemy.”