Former MI5 agent and whistleblower Annie Machon called the arrest of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange “absolutely disgusting,” and an “egregious violation” of his rights.

Assange was dragged by British police from the Ecuadorian embassy in London on Thursday morning after his asylum right was axed. The arrest comes a day after WikiLeaks Editor-in-Chief Kristinn Hrafnsson detailed an extensive spying campaign against Assange, and two weeks after WikiLeaks announced a corruption investigation against Ecuadorian President Lenín Moreno.

“It’s almost like tit-for-tat,” Machon told RT. “This is an egregious violation of so many rights under international law.”

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“It has been stated by the UN that his rights were being infringed,” she continued. “And then you have him being spied on all the time, including conversations with his lawyers which are supposed to be legally privileged, and conversations with his doctors, again supposed to be privileged.”

Meanwhile, former Ecuadorian president Rafael Correa called his successor “the greatest traitor in Ecuadorian and Latin American history” for allowing British police to enter the country’s embassy and arrest Assange. Machon told RT that she hopes to hear similar condemnations from world leaders in the coming hours and days.

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“We’ve seen time and time again how easy it is for the mainstream media to be controlled and manipulated from behind the scenes by the intelligence agencies and by governments,” she said.

“And that is precisely the model that Julian Assange tried to break. And he did it courageously and he did it knowing full well what he’d be facing.”

“For Britain and Ecuador, probably to just hand him over to the States for some incredibly harsh non-justice, is I think, absolutely disgusting.”

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