Today Stockholm’s appeal court has rejected a demand to lift the arrest warrant against Julian Assange. This leaves him in limbo in Ecuador’s London embassy.
There is much to be said about the Swedish case against Assange. (It’s very thin.) One could speculate about the risk of Sweden handing him over to the US. (There might be a risk, but that is also the case in the UK.) But let me focus on something else: The Swedish prosecutor in this case, Marianne Ny.
Ny has stubbornly refused to go to London to interview Assange. She refused to do it when it could have been done at the Swedish embassy. And she refuses to do it now, at the Ecuadorian embassy.
Ny has claimed that prosecutors don’t travel abroad to interview people. She has claimed that it is too expensive. And she has presented the rather odd argument that Assange might not want to answer her questions anyway.
Recently the UK Foreign Office said it would “welcome a request by the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny to question Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy and would be happy to facilitate such a move”. Link »
And today the Swedish appeal court made a special point about the prosecutors’ failure to examine alternative avenues of investigation. Link »
One could suspect that prosecutor Ny is acting in line with the interest of those who think that the best place to have Julian Assange tucked away is in limbo at the Ecuadorian embassy.
And one thing is for sure: Prosecutor Ny is not telling the truth when she claims that Swedish prosecutors do not go abroad to interview people.
A year and a half ago–when I worked in the European Parliament–I had a Swedish prosecutor, a Swedish police inspector, two members of the Belgian Federal Police and one (rather poor) translator barge into my flat in Brussels. At 7 o’clock in the morning.
The reason was a rather mundane tax dispute between me and Swedish authorities.
They looked around in my apartment (and impounded some letters from the Swedish tax authorities to me!), then invited me to a “voluntary” interview at the Belgian Federal Police headquarters the next day (where I was refused to have a lawyer present).
This clearly demonstrates that Swedish prosecutors happily do go abroad, even for minor cases (especially when it includes visiting an exciting foreign city).
It also demonstrates that Swedish prosecutors do not care care a bit about costs. The price tag for this whole operation, with international police assistance, must have been enormous. And absolutely not proportionate, taking the amount of money in my tax case into consideration. (If they had sent me a letter, I would happily have travelled to Stockholm to meet with them.)
This is how Swedish authorities act in a rather insignificant case about taxes. It makes it even more remarkable that they refuse to move at all–when it comes to an high profile case as that of Julian Assange, with its high level political and geopolitical implications.
Prosecutor Marianne Ny should be removed from the Assange case. (Especially as Chief Prosecutor Eva Finné already dismissed the whole case back in August 2010, before Ny suddenly entered the scene to reopen it.)
/ HAX
But that is different: Assange raped someone while your case was about TAXES. Tax crimes are always top priority for Swedish authorities. Next time beat someone up and see if they bother seeking you out for that.
It sounds like you have some foresight or omnipresence ability to say with such easiness that “Assange raped someone”. He is ACCUSED of that -a charge dismissed by the chief prosecutor as HAX mentioned here- and that is precisely what Ny is supposed to PROVE. She obviously isn’t interested in doing so.
Assange raped nobody. After a consensual – if complicated coupling, he went for “sloppy-seconds” without the requested condom. His partner pushed a complaint to have him HIV tested, and when this action was inflated by a prosecutor to “rape” status, she WITHDREW complaint.
Please, acquaint oneself with facts. They would make your red-herrings so much more effective.
It was an act of poor judgement on his part. Rather than admitting that in court (facing little or no legal consequences in Sweden) he is hiding in an embassy, effectively reducing himself and his(?) cause for exposing corruption down to yesterdays news.
u fucking worm scum, augustus. he didn’t rape anyone. here’s the idiot girl’s own tweet saying it, so take ur dumb ass and go kill yourself. http://MillionMaskMarch.com/julian_assange
Can you not then contact Julian Assange to help him, by providing evidence that they can and do in fact travel abroad to conduct interviews? This farce has gone on far too long at a massive cost to both the UK and Sweden.
There is plenty of evidence that Swedish authorities can/will and do travel to do interviews. There is the Mutual Assistance Treaty that allows it.
Of course they can, of course they have done so in other cases. But they do not have an OBLIGATION to do it in his case. The best way of discrediting Assange is by letting him focus all his efforts on fighting his own windmills.
Interesting that rationale of Ny’s that it’s just too expensive for her to travel about 400 miles to the UK and so that’s why Assange must stay holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy… The cost of flights to London from Sweden is in some cases as low as about £100 return. The costs of keeping Assange in that embassy is millions every year to the Uk taxpayer. Shouldn’t then the British government offer to pay for Ny to travel? It would be a bargain even if she went first class and we put her up in the Ritz. No, obviously the argument about costs is baloney – the sort of clear untruth wheeled out by those who are well trained in duplicity!
The attorneys office in Sweden has got the legal and practical alternative of questioning him at the embassy. They do not have the OBLIGATION to do so. Assange has the alternative of standing up for himself and meet the charges but he is to damn proud to do so – he knows that it would present him for what he probably is – not a rapist but a sexist with a problem with boundires.
If fighting the corrupt governments and their illegal and immoral wars was his true objective, his cause would gain much more from him traveling to Sweden than him hiding in an embassy.
But SVEA court said they have an obligation to conduct an investigation and to come up with a solution instead of waiting.
Everybody knows this is a political and legal repercution for realeasing the irak war logs. I dont think is rare. I dont think is odd. They (the stablishment) want to make sure he wont move and will try to destroy him. This is not about rape. This is about control and power.
The best thing to do would be to go to Sweden and answer the charges. The media coverage would be massive compared to the amount of attention he and his(?) cause for fighting corruption is getting now. He does not seem a self-sacrificing man to me – he enjoyed being a rock star but not to have his actions towards his groupies scrutinized in public.
Gustav Troll,
Have you not heard… are you not aware of the asylum status?
That is not a mere board game move of tactics. It means there is evidence of danger to a person, persecution, life danger, etc., by reason of their ideas.
To dismiss that and to ridicule the man like you do, just shows you are both unintelligent and biased. You are biased and your justifications are simply idiotically dumb.
Have you thought of taking up gardening?
Or does this trolling or repeating mainstream babble, pay you better wages?
I am at a loss to comprehend the imbecility of your observations, I am sorry.
You don’t prove to be following the subject matter with any sort logical sequence of thought.
SHAME ON THE BRITISH AND SWEDISH GOVERNMENTS FOR CONTINUING TO PERSECUTE OUR HERO JULIAN ASSANGE!
A hero would have stood up to the charges as not to let them become a weapon of the governments in their efforts to discredit the movement for Internet- and AFK freedom.
A hero is not defined by someone that dies or risks his life to prove he is right.
A hero is someone who will protect the interest of the majority, and of those that rely upon him for protection.
Julian is not a kamikaze.
Wikileaks is too valuable, as is his role in it, far too valuable in these times, for a pathetic allegation of this kind or any other for that matter, to match its importance.
To renounce that responsibility, just to satiate the curiosity of the tabloid reader and tabloid writers like you is hardly what I would call heroic.
This man is already so unimaginably heroic that your assertions and assumptions, again, show at best your lack of ability, or unwillingness to discern.
You are a classic troll, and this is my last writing to you.
My advice to you is get informed and get a different source of income, you are betraying mankind itself with your troll actions and words.
The political cost for turning Assange over to the US from either the UK or from Sweden would be enormous for the respective governments. It won’t happen. Besides, there was plenty of time for the UK police to hand him over to the US before he took refugee at the Ecuadorian embassy and they didn’t do it. He is allowed to stay at the embassy not because of the Ecuadorian government’s love of free speech but rather it’s love of pissing off their counterparts in the US.
What I see in Assange is a White, Offended Male (a “Vit Kränkt Man” to use a spot-on swedish expression) that is to damn proud to admit that, even though it may not have been an act of rape he commited, it was most likely an act of self righteous narcissism.
Now the good things he has done with exposing the US’s war crimes in Iraq is overshadowed by him being hell bent on fighting his own windmills.
you seem to know a lot about Assanges personality, but not much about US Grand Jurys and and FBI investigation
You say that the political cost would be “enormous” for UK and Sweden. But is that true? What about Gary McKinnon a mental ill person who was sent to US court!?
Gary McKinnon was in court for 10 years fighting the extradition warrant to the US. The warrant was removed by the UK upon his diagnosis. He currently runs a business specializing in search engine optimization.