About 500 celebrities and organizations, including director Oliver Stone, Chinese dissident, artist Ai Weiwei, signed a petition calling on London and Stockholm to restore freedom of movement to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
The petition published today by WikiLeaks calls on the British and Swedish governments to respect the recommendations of the UN panel which in early February requested the release of the Australian, judging that it was "arbitrary detention".
"We call on Sweden and Great Britain to respect the binding nature of the human rights conventions on which this decision is based" and to restore Julian Assange's "freedom of movement", write the signatories of this text.
Among them are British creator Vivienne Westwood, environmentalist and MEP Eva Jolie, but also the Spanish radical left-wing party Podemos, French sociologist Edgar Moren, former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, as well as Iranian Nobel Peace Prize laureate Shirin Ebadi.
Assange has been in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for three years, after Sweden sought his extradition over alleged sexual assaults.
Swedish authorities want to question Assange over an alleged 2010 sexual assault in that country. Assange denies the charges, and in June 2012 he sought political asylum at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden.
Assange believes Sweden would extradite him to the US, where he faces charges for posting thousands of secret US government documents on his website.
A UN task force said on February 5 that Britain and Sweden have held the WikiLeaks founder in "arbitrary detention" since December 2010 and that he should be released and entitled to compensation.
Swedish and British authorities have rejected the UN panel's recommendation, arguing that they did not arbitrarily detain Assange and that he is in the Ecuadorian embassy voluntarily.
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