Icelandic lawmakers propose granting Snowden citizenship



Icelandic lawmakers discuss granting immediate citizenship to Edward Snowden.

Icelandic lawmakers have proposed a bill to grant immediate citizenship to American whistleblower Edward Snowden who blew the lid on U.S. spying programs.

On Thursday, members of Iceland’s Pirate Party introduced a bill in the parliament suggesting that Snowden should immediately be granted citizenship of the island nation.

The draft law was backed by the liberal Left-Green Party and the Brighter Future Party.

Snowden has already told the Guardian that he is inclined “to seek asylum in a country with shared values. The nation that most encompasses this is Iceland.”

On June 23, Snowden flew to Moscow from Hong Kong and has been in the transit zone of a Moscow airport since then.

According to a statement from the anti-secrecy website WikiLeaks, Snowden has applied for asylum in a total of 21 countries across the globe.

However, Washington has revoked Snowden’s passport, depriving him of the necessary documentation with which to travel.

If Snowden is granted Icelandic citizenship, he does not need to be on Icelandic soil to apply for asylum in the country.

Documents disclosed by Snowden to The Guardian and The Washington Post revealed two major spying programs run by the U.S. National Security Agency, one for gathering U.S. phone records and another, called PRISM, for tracking the use of U.S.-based web servers by American citizens and other nationals.

Other documents also revealed that the NSA spied on European Union offices in Washington, D.C., New York, and the heart of Europe, Brussels.

Washington has charged Snowden with espionage. However, according to former Texas Congressman Ron Paul, espionage means giving “classified information to the enemy” and since Snowden “shared information with the American people,” the U.S. government views U.S. citizens “as the enemy”.
PressTV