Within hours of the report’s release, British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt took to Twitter to denounce it as “wrong.” He declared that “Assange chose to hide in the embassy and was always free to leave and face justice.” Hunt demanded that the UN Special Rapporteur “allow British courts to make their judgements without his interference or inflammatory accusations.”

Melzer directly replied to Hunt, correctly noting that “Mr Assange was about as ‘free to leave’” Ecuador’s London embassy, “as someone sitting on a rubberboat in a sharkpool.”