Julian Assange Plans Modeling Debut At London Fashion Show

An anonymous reader writes with news about a possible new direction for Julian Assange. Julian Assange is expected to make his London Fashion Week debut this September. The Australian WikiLeaks founder will reportedly model for Vivienne Westwood’s son, Ben Westwood, at a fashion show staged at the Ecuadorean Embassy, where he has been seeking refuge for the past two years. He is avoiding extradition to Sweden, where he is wanted for questioning over claims of sex offences. “Julian’s been in the embassy for two years and it’s important that he doesn’t slip into obscurity,” said Ben Westwood. “I want to highlight Julian Assange’s plight. What happened to him is totally unfair.”

Comments

Re: and yet

[bill_mcgonigle]

This is misinformed - he was transiting through Russia when the US revoked his passport, and according to the stupid nation-state rules, that grounded him. If anybody chose where to cause Snowden to seek asylum it was John Kerry. He would have been in Latin America if not for the US State Department. Which, ironically would have been worse for him because the USG has no compunction about doing covert ops there. #monroedoctrine

Re:and yet

[Rei]

False. Among countless sources you can read which demonstrate the falsity of the "free to leave" claim, you can read the SMS logs between Assange's lawyer and the prosecutor, or the British Lower Court ruling. While Assange was leaving the country, his lawyer (Björn Hurtig) was pretending that Assange had no plans to leave and was setting up an interview between Assange and the prosecutors' office in Sweden. Later he tried to mislead the British lower court into thinking that he didn't know that the prosecutor's office still wanted Assange. The judge caught him in the lie, chewed him out (he's lucky he didn't get hit with sanctions), and received an official condemnation by the Swedish Bar Association.

Assange did face one round of preliminary questioning, and only concerning the girl that there are no rape charges concerning (AA). He has never been questioned about the girl that the rape charge is about (SW). That's what the interview that he was supposed to stand for when he fled Sweden was to be about.

There is no "different crime unit". The initial prosecutor, Eva Finne, was put on the case because the report was made during a weekend and she was the only one available. She initially opened an investigation into two counts of rape and various lesser charges - one count of rape against each woman. News of the investigation quickly leaked (as almost always happens in Sweden due to their whistleblower protection laws), which put the prosecutor in an awkward spot, as the name of a suspect isn't supposed to be released until they're charged. She quickly got a warrant issued against Assange - despite the fact that he had never refused to cooperate. This in turn led to a major backlash. She shortly thereafter she withdrew the rape charges to cancel the warrant, but left the investigation open into the lesser sexual assault charges. This in turn led to a protest being filed by Claes Borgström, the legal representative of the accusers, as SW's victim statement hadn't even gotten into the computer at the time, so there's no way the case could have been fairly reviewed. Sweden has an appeals board process at this stage, which is fairly commonly utilized in the Swedish judicial system. The board ruled in favor of the women, and the case was re-opened, which put the next senior prosecutor, Marianne Ny, on the case. Ny reopened the case for all five counts (it was later reduced to four on appeal; these four are what ended up in the EAW which stands to this day)

A bit about the nomenclature. I use the word "charges", but of course, that's an English term, the Swedish judicial system is structured differently. First you "anklaga" someone, then you "åtala" them. The first stage means you have to have a formal list of things they're approved of, you can get a warrant, the accused can appeal and get a court hearing (all of this happened, Assange lost with a finding of probable cause of rape, and had his loss sustained on appeal). The second stage (being åtalad) starts the process of the trial. The subject has to have everything they're being åtalad over put before them in questioning before the decision to åtala is taken, and then the trial must begin within a short, fixed time period. Hence, you anklaga someone to get them into custody, then you åtala them to try them. Assange has been anklagad but not åtalad. For the purpose of the EAW, being anklagad was ruled as being equivalent of being charged by every level of the UK judicial system, but Assange and a lot of his backers make much ado about him not being "charged", only translating åtalad as charged. Either way, what matters is Assange is charged to the maximum extent possible under the Swedish judicial system at this stage, as he has not surrendered to Swedish custody and thus cannot be åtalad.

I should probably include the sworn statement of the prosecutor (Ny) concerning the questioning: "Subject to