Ecuador and Sweden finally agreed last week that Swedish prosecutors could question Julian Assange at the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, where he has been holed up since 2012. The sooner the better.

Mr. Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, is central to a critical debate about secrecy, privacy and the public interest in the digital age. And if the United States or any other government has a legal case against him — whether over allegations of rape, which is why the Swedes want to question him, or the publishing of confidential documents, which is what WikiLeaks does — it should no longer be held up by a procedural dispute.

Mr. Assange’s long years in the Ecuadorean Embassy have not silenced WikiLeaks, as the recent distribution of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee demonstrated. Nor have his years in the embassy resolved questions about the legality or morality of Mr. Assange’s self-appointed mission.

Unlike Pvt. Chelsea Manning and the other celebrated leaker of United States government documents, Edward Snowden — both of whom worked directly or indirectly for the government and released documents they knew they were not allowed to release — Mr. Assange and his organization publish materials others have purloined. The legal issues are therefore different, and it is far from certain that the United States could build a successful case against Mr. Assange, an Australian national.