London authorities will no longer stand outside the Ecuadorean embassy where Julian Assange has, since 2012, sought refuge from rape charges.

In 2010, after speaking at a conference in Sweden, two women filed charges of rape and molestation against Assange who went on to deny the accusations.

After Interpol issued a warrant for his arrest, Assange gave himself up, appeared before a judge in Westminster and was granted bail. Swedish prosecutors called for him to be extradited, but Assange's lawyers said that, if he was sent to Sweden, he risked being sent to the U.S. where the government has called WikiLeaks-related releases of confidntial information criminal acts

Ecuador granted Assange asylum in August of 2012 and he has been in the Ecuadorean embassy in London ever since.

The Metropolitan Police, citing their finite resources, said that the current deployment of officers before the Ecuadorean embassy “is no longer believed proportionate.” They do, however, remain committed to executing the arrest warrant on Assange and presenting him before court.

WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson says that the fact that the police are stepping away from the embassy changes nothing. As reported in the BBC, Hrafnsson said, "They will still arrest Julian if he steps outside the embassy so there is no real change to the situation, other than the removal of uniformed police officers."

Speaking with to the New Yorker in 2010, Assange voiced his intentions for WikiLeaks, saying, “I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research -- the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well.”