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WikiLeaks' Assange Hopes To Exit London Embassy "Soon"
An anonymous reader writes Julian Assange has hosted a press conference in which he indicated he is soon about to leave the embassy of Ecuador in London. From the article: "WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has spent over two years in Ecuador's London embassy to avoid a sex crimes inquiry in Sweden, said on Monday he planned to leave the building 'soon', but Britain signaled it would still arrest him if he tried. Assange made the surprise assertion during a news conference alongside Ecuador's Foreign Minister Ricardo Patino. But his spokesman played down the chances of an imminent departure, saying the British government would first need to revise its position and let him leave without arrest, something it has repeatedly refused to do.
Over here! Look at me! I'm still here!
He is not scared of being put in jail in Sweden. He is shitting bricks over the thought of Sweden handing him over to the Americans.
I bet he could work out a deal with Sweden for time served.
If the Swedish charges against him were legitimate he could.
Nah, they make him prime minister of Italy and everything's gonna be a-ok.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Suppose they drove a van into the embassy, Assange got in (or didn't get in), and they drove it out to an airport.
Your plan is close, but you would actually need a man-sized diplomatic pouch, large enough for Assange to crouch within, with the zipper fully closed with a diplomatic seal. He'd need to stay in the pouch until his plane was outside territorial airspace.
>So essentially all Ecuador has to do is give him citizenship and declare him a diplomat?
No, the host country has to agree to the designation as well.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
The people involved in common sex scandals aren't enemies of the most powerful state on Earth.
The US has an exception to the rule that statesf: If a foreign diplomat is deemed a spy, fuck it. It goes back to the cold war era.
I almost want to believe he's deliberately teasing the authorities into increasing the surveillance around the embassy, at a time when that ongoing expense is causing angry murmurs the general public. That would be pretty clever.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
"Nah, they make him prime minister of Italy and everything's gonna be ok-a."
^ FTFY
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Except per Swedish and EU law tht would be illegal. I dot know why you people keep bringing it up.
That doesn't mean it won't happen.
I don't think it will, but stranger things have happened and I understand his concern.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If the Swedish charges against him were legitimate he could.
Are you suggesting......it might not have been a legitimate rape?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Are you really so naive to think the law matters in a case like this?
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
If it didn't matter, he wouldn't be safe in an embassy either.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Sweden could drop their charges today.
He still skipped bail from a UK court. And it's arguable he's currently resisting arrest.
Game over. You will be arrested and convicted if you leave.
The fact that people conflate "arrest" and "charges" into one is also annoying. You "arrest" someone in order to stop them leaving until you can ascertain whether "charges" are necessary and what charges are suitable (if someone is killed and you arrest someone else for murder, you can't then release them because it actually turned out to be manslaughter, or GBH, or a theft, on their part - they are under arrest until the charges are determined, if any). Sure, you need a reason . But "because an EU nation asked for your detainment" is good enough in the law, and skipping bail is definitely good enough.
So apart from skipping bail, resisting arrest, and everything else, the charges in Sweden mean little at this point. And the UK, whether you think they are in collusion or not, have the right to enforce their law on their soil (and, no, the embassy is NOT Ecuadorian soil, don't make that "old wives' tale" mistake).
Even if the UK couldn't care less about Sweden's demands, they went through the proper channels, offered appeals, it went to the Supreme Court and he ran away from UK bail. Game over. We HAVE to arrest you the second you try to leave or every Tom, Dick and Harry will follow suit thinking it's a "get out of jail free card" to just resist arrest and skip bail.
It was also illegal in the EU for poland to host a CIA torture site. That doesn't mean it didn't happen. Its illegality is small comfort to those that suffered there. If not illegal, it was extremely uncouth for France, Spain, Portugal and Austria to collude in bringing down the Bolivian Presidential plane down to search it for Snowden. I get the impression that most western European countries seem to be quite happy to ignore their laws and customs if the US government asks/tells them to.
You cant get "time served" for time you spent in a safe house evading the law. It doesnt work that way.
I dont know about pigs, but I think I saw a strawman shooting across the room a minute ago...
There's law, and there's international diplomacy. If they yank him out of an embassy, every embassy is at risk of wanton search, and you can say goodbye to diplomatic immunity. If, at some point, Sweden extradites Assange to the US and there's a bit of outcry, they'll say "Oops, maybe we shouldn't have done that", and there will be no repercussions (except for Assange).
I haven't heard Sweden state that they will categorically not extradite him to the US, though.
You seem a little ignorant of recent history. Have you heard of America's rendition program? Have you heard of all the EU countries which participated? Here's a map to help:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
I know almost nothing about cars. Allow me to provide a car analogy ....
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Suppose they drove a van into the embassy, Assange got in (or didn't get in), and they drove it out to an airport.
Your plan is close, but you would actually need a man-sized diplomatic pouch, large enough for Assange to crouch within, with the zipper fully closed with a diplomatic seal. He'd need to stay in the pouch until his plane was outside territorial airspace.
The "diplomatic pouch" concept comes from the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, art. 27:
Art. 27(3): The diplomatic bag shall not be opened or detained.
However, the next section kills your plan:
Art. 27(4): The packages constituting the diplomatic bag must bear visible external marks of their character and may contain only diplomatic documents or articles intended for official use.
Diplomatic pouches have been opened in the past when they contained, for example, mines, drugs, and even a person - and they weren't violations of the Convention, because they were no longer diplomatic pouches.
No, you are wrong.
We (Sweden) have a separate agreement with the U.S. regarding this. That's why he's scared of being transported to the U.S. from Sweden.
The Swedes certainly are, or they would have issued a warrant for his arrest rather than for questioning.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
...is shitting bricks over the thought of Sweden handing him over to the Americans
...handing him over to the despotic occupiers of the US government. FTFY.
The US is totally off its constitutional rails.
What sex crimes? I'm unaware of any government anywhere that has charged him with any sex crimes.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Actually he violated the terms of his bail in the UK. So he can be apprehended at any time. He knew this as he fled into the Embassy. I agree with you though, he's probably tired of staring at the four walls every day and even RT is not giving him the airtime he used to get.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
When there is proof of a crime then yes, that's how it is done. You don't seem to understand how this whole legal system thing works. Do you really think that cops never arrest people first and then ask questions? You might need to watch an episode or two of Law and Order, which, for all its inaccuracies, at least portrays that realistically.
Only in cases where people come up with non-sequiters as phenomenally stupid as yours.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
'nudge nudge' 'wink wink' would have simply put a bullet in his head over 2 years ago if they wanted to. The only person who cares about what Assange says at this point is himself. No intelligent person gives a shit what he says anymore, he's proven repeatedly that he's nothing more than an attention whore who twists things to promote his own personal agenda.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
If the Swedish charges against him were legitimate he could.
Are you suggesting......it might not have been a legitimate rape?
Under Swedish law, when you have sex with your girlfriend, you've raped her if you have a fling with a young chick afterwards.
You had sex with her under false pretenses: giving her the impression that she's your girlfriend now.
Sweden is a feminist paradise.
Oh no. An attention whore? Involved in politics? How unprecedented.
If the Swedish charges against him were legitimate he could.
He has not ben charged as far as I know, there's only allegations. What's not legitimate about that?
I'm not fond of conspiracy theories, but when his unnameable accuser turns out to have been on the payroll of a group funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, working in Cuba to "assist" the Cuban people develop democracy, I have to wonder.
Yep, prior to that, he wasn't in any legal trouble in the UK. They were going to ship him off to Sweden, because they'd received an extradition request that their courts had determined legal, but he was in no trouble there.
However, as soon as he fled to the embassy, he broke UK law. So now he's in trouble in the UK, if nothing else. Regardless of the validity of the allegation in Sweden, he broke UK law by fleeing the extradition.
Thanks to Wikileaks we know that the US has been rendering people illegally from the EU. It's mostly been stopped now but I'm sure they would make an exception for someone like Assange.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
And how many presidential candidates have sung about bombing Sweden or the UK in the campaigns?
Dumbfuck.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
I see from the comments here that the governmental mission of character assassination of this fellow is largely complete and successful. Do you know Assange personally? Have you ever had dealings with him apart from seeing stories online and on TV about him? I don't and I haven't, and thus I don't pretend the biases against him that most people here seem to have been suckered into (nor do I have any bias toward him).
I don't find a coordinated corporate media campaign to ruin this guy unrealistic in the least, though.
http://internationalextraditionblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/us-sweden-extradition-supplementary-treaty-35-ust-2501.pdf
The supplementary treaty between Sweden and U.S.
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2012/06/25/the_brilliant_legal_calculus_behind_assanges_asylum_request
The legal calculus behind Assange's asylum request
And you also have this monster thread regarding this (in Swedish) with over 62000 comments!
https://www.flashback.org/t1275257
Wikileaks grundare Julian Assange eftersokt for valdtakt i Sverige
Except per Swedish and EU law that would be illegal.
I don't know why you people keep bringing it up.
Because Assange has said that if Britain and Sweden would put forth a good-faith promise not to extradite him he would happily travel to Sweden to face the molestation charges.
If what you are saying is true then I don't know why Glenn Greenwald (a former lawyer) and others would have put together a document detailing exactly how the two governments could make that promise,
This is why this is so crucial: if Sweden (and/or Britain) would provide some meaningful assurance that Assange would not be extradited to the US to face espionage charges for WikiLeaks' journalism, then the vast majority of asylum supporters (including me) would loudly demand that he immediately travel to Stockholm to confront those allegations; Assange himself has said he would do so. That gives the lie to the ugly slander that those who have expressed support for Ecuador's asylum decision are dismissive of the sex assault claims or do not care about seeing them resolved.
Speaking for myself, I have always said the same thing about those allegations in Sweden from the moment they emerged: they are serious and deserve legal resolution. It is not Assange or his supporters preventing that resolution, but the Swedish and British governments, which are strangely refusing even to negotiate as to how Assange's rights against unjust extradition and political persecution can be safeguarded along with the rights of the complainants to have their allegations addressed.
Of course, Greenwald and the Guardian might be lying but, at this point, I trust them much more than I trust British and Swedish governments.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Assange may well not be around for much longer without access to sunlight or at least supplementing with vitamin D. The article says: "Asked about his health, Assange said anyone would be affected by spending two years in a building with no outside areas or direct sunlight, a complaint he has made several times before."
According to these, he probably needs on the order of 2000-5000 IU Vitamin D3 daily as supplements:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://www.grassrootshealth.ne...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
He might need more for a while to catch up if he is already severely vitamin D deficient. The US RDA for vitamin D for most adults is about 5X-10X too low, so generally you don't get enough from food. Many indoor workers are vitamin D deficient these days, given we usually work, play, and commute inside something with windows that block UV-B radiation. Our carpets maybe won't fade from filtered sunlight, but our health will.
However, we don't know all the compounds that the human skin makes in response to sunlight. He might want to look into using special purpose UV-B lamps as well. Mercola talks about that:
http://articles.mercola.com/si...
There are some rare health conditions like sarcoidosis that make vitamin D supplements problematical, so if he has any special health issues like that, he should talk to a knowledgeable doctor before supplementing.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I dot know why you people keep bringing it up.
Because despite being illegal, Sewden has a record of handing people over to the CIA to be tortured. The fact that it's illegal will be cold comfort to those who so suffered.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
In particular, there's an instance in which people were extracted from Sweden without any legal process, under US supervision, to Egypt, where they were almost certainly tortured.
To my knowledge, there's been no similar case in the UK.
Yes, Assange was so terrified of those evil Swedes, those American puppets, that he was moving Wikileaks' base of operations there (after alienating the majority of his Iceland team) and applying for a residence permit there, right? That's why he called Sweden's laws and legal system his "shield" in multiple interviews, right? That's why Wikileaks leaked that in 2006 Sweden caused a major diplomatic rift with the US by outright disguising their special forces as airport workers to break into a CIA rendition flight to stop the US, right?
Funny how Sweden only became evil US lackeys after he was anklagad for rape.
Musk needs a safer hobby than Twitter. Fire juggling? Cage fighting? Solo hot air balloon trips?
Wrong. Sweden *additionally* has restrictions in their extradition law banning extradition for intelligence and military crimes, beyond the general EU restrictions. Which is why they refused to hand over Edward Lee Howard (the most major CIA defector to the USSR) after only a very brief preliminary investigation; it's simply banned to extradite for such crimes. Think the US didn't really want Howard? Not to mention that the UK *also* has veto over any extradition, as the sending state under a EU surrender request , so he'd be *safer* in Sweden (it's an extra barrier). And here we're talking about the UK, the country that wouldn't even hand over Gary McKinnon, the most damaging hacker of US military systems on record, because "he has aspergers" (as if Julian I-Have-To-Wear-Specific-Jackets-To-Write-Specific-Documents Assange doesn't?). Think the US didn't really want McKinnon? And of course, the ECHR has veto power over every step of the way - the ECHR which is often considered the greatest refuge for people fleeing extradition on Earth, the same court body that goes so far in terms of protecting the rights of suspects and prisoners that it ruled that you can't ban UK prisoners who are in prison from voting or sex offenders serving time for their offenses from having access to (government paid) reproductive services.
And what praytell was the plan here? Instead of waiting until Julian, famous for being a globetrotter, goes to a trivially easy nation, let's insist on getting him in the nation that *he himself* chose as the most difficult? And then let's not have a single person even watch him to warn the Swedes when he leaves or warn the British when he jumps bail? And let's complicate the whole thing with competing local charges?
The conspiracy theory is so far into fantasyland that parents in Narnia could use it as a bedtime story for their kids. And Assange knows this. Whenever it's pointed out, he always changes the subject. He lost one of his biggest supporters this way, Jemima Khan, who posted a huge chunk of his bail, but now considers him a "new L. Ron Hubbard" because of his dodges on this issue.
Musk needs a safer hobby than Twitter. Fire juggling? Cage fighting? Solo hot air balloon trips?
When will this myth die? From the official sworn statement of the Swedish prosecutor submitted to the British courts:
There is an EAW out for him. It lays out four charges: 1x unlawful sexual coersion, 2x molestation, and 1x rape. The checkbox for rape is marked next to he rape charge (#4). Every level of the British court system has reviewed the warrant and reached the same conclusions: Everything he is charged with in Sweden would be their equivalent crimes in the UK (including rape), the warrant is legitimate, and he is wanted for the purposes of prosecution, not merely questioning.
Musk needs a safer hobby than Twitter. Fire juggling? Cage fighting? Solo hot air balloon trips?
He was never free to go; that's a myth spread by his attorney, who received an official condemnation by the Swedish Bar Association for lying about that in court as well as a major dressing down from the judge (he's lucky he didn't get hit with legal sanctions). There was never a time period where he was not under investigation, and when he fled the country, his attorney was actively pretending that Assange was getting ready to come in willingly (and then after he got to the UK, Hurtg continued stalling, pretending Assange was going to be coming immediately back). If you want to see all the nitty-gritty, you can read the Ny SMS logs, they've been released.
To go into more details about the early stages: AA and SW walked into a Stockholm police station and made the report, and were interviewed by two separate officers. As it was a weekend, the only available prosecutor, Eva Finne, took the case. There were a total of three initial investigating officers - Wassgren, Krans, and Gehlen. Wassgren and Gehlen felt, from the interviews, that Assange should be charged with five counts (2x molestatation, 1x unlawful sexual coersion, 2x rape); Krans felt it should be 2x, 1x, 2x. News quickly broke that Assange was being investigated. This is supposed to be illegal, the name isn't supposed to be disclosed at this stage but Sweden has some crazy-strong whistleblower protection laws (part of the reason Assange was moving there in the first place), you can't even investigate to find out who made a leak, so it always happens when cases involve famous people. Finne quickly had a warrant issued for Assange's arrest for the two rapes - even though he had not at that point refused to cooperate. There was naturally a huge backlash, and Finne withdrew the warrant (thus dropping the rape charges), but kept the investigation open for the molestation and unlawful sexual coersion charges. It was during this time that Assange was interviewed; since the only investigations open referred to the lesser charges, that's all he was interviewed about. Meanwhile, the legal representative of the women, Claes Borgström, appealed the decision (Sweden has a police appeal board, which is frequently used for cases like this and isn't particularly unusual); the fact that Finne had dropped the rape charge concerning SW before SW's statement had even gotten into the computer system made it pretty obvious that the case hadn't gotten a fair hearing, and the board ruled in favor of the women. The case was thus transferred to the next prosecutor up, Marianne Ny. Ny reopened the investigation for all five counts, and tried to get Assange back in to interview him for the dropped charges. The team meanwhile did lots of followup interviews and forensics collection and testing. It was during this time that Assange fled to the UK. Ny spent over a month trying to get Assange to come back, continually reaching out to his attorney, even the day before she went into court to get a warrant for him. A judge approved the Swedish warrant (thus he was formally anklagad, the Swedish stage for trying to get a person into custody so that they can then be åtalad, which is the stage that leads to trial) and subsequently the EAW was issued. The original warrant was open for the full five counts. Assange appealed to the Svea Board of Appeals (Sweden has a strong defendents rights process, even though he was hiding from the law he was still able in absentia to appeal the investigation), and a full court hearing was held involving a full review of the evidence and testimony from Assange's attorneys. For the most part, he lost - one of the rape charges was dropped, but the other and all of the others were upheld, leaving a formal finding of probable cause of rape, molestation, and unlawful sexual coersion. Assange appealed to the Swedish Supreme Court. His appeal was rejected. He then moved through the appeals process in the British system, first the lower court, the high court, and the Supreme Court, alleging malicious p
Musk needs a safer hobby than Twitter. Fire juggling? Cage fighting? Solo hot air balloon trips?
What Assange is *actually* charged with, the rape charge (#4 on the EAW) is:
There are a few other facts that made me doubt all of that. They're hard for me to find because the complaintant's name has been scrubbed from the news accounts so I can't do a Google search for her, but:
(1) Immediately after the supposed rape, she was tweeting that "Julian is FANTASTIC" and she still continued to have sex with him. If your boyfriend "rapes" you (and you're not into that), I would expect you to break up with him.
(2) She filed her complaint after she found out that Assange was also fucking a younger girl. She also had a blog on the subject of "Revenge", which she took down afterwards. On the blog she recommended getting revenge on boyfriends who cheated on you.
(3) This is conveniently for her a situation which happened in the bedroom and which nobody else can confirm. It's her word against his. Do you think it's possible that a man could be falsely convicted (with the help of a jealous ex-girlfriend who likes to get revenge)?
(4) What's the boundary between forcing yourself on an unwilling woman, and convincing an unwilling woman to be willing? She invited him to live with her, she was sleeping in the same bed with him, and she was fucking him up to then, after all.
(5) She was working in Cuba with an international "aid" group promoting Cuban "democracy" that received some funding from the CIA. I don't like to be conspiratorial, but why did somebody work for the CIA and then go to the other side to become Assange's escort?
To put it quite plainly, he's charged with, when a girl who was paranoid about disease and pregnancy refused to have unprotected sex with him, he waited until she fell asleep and then started F*ing her unprotected. Which is F*ing rape, and the fact that people keep trying to pretend that it's not "real" rape, I find sickening.
Yeah, that's what she said after consultation with her lawyers and the prosecutors to figure out how to write a complaint that would hold up in court. It might be true and it might not be. If I were on a jury and I saw the facts above, I would be left with a reasonable doubt.
You're outraged because you assume the story she told was true. Suppose the story wasn't true. Your outrage would be misplaced, wouldn't it?
I haven't heard Sweden state that they will categorically not extradite him to the US, though.
The Swedish government has also not denied that they plan make him crown prince with a 1.000.000.000.000 SEK stipend, or that they will stick a rocket in his butt and shoot him into space to suffocate. The probability of all three isn't terribly different.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
What sex crimes? I'm unaware of any government anywhere that has charged him with any sex crimes.
And despite the fact that it has been repeatedly discussed you are also unaware that the Swedish legal system requires that he be interviewed again before they can charge him. Many people here exploit that difference in the legal system (one shared by a number of European countries) to try to depict Assange as innocent, or that there are no serious allegations against him, or that he doesn't face the prospect of charges. That is false.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
'nudge nudge' 'wink wink' would have simply put a bullet in his head over 2 years ago if they wanted to. The only person who cares about what Assange says at this point is himself. No intelligent person gives a shit what he says anymore, he's proven repeatedly that he's nothing more than an attention whore who twists things to promote his own personal agenda.
if no one cares about Assange why is he still allowed to live in the Ecuadorian embassy?
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
Actually it happens a lot, Jordan and the UK were involved in years of negotiations to get Abu Qatada extradited to Jordan and it involved Jordan making outright changes to their legal system to accomodate and ensure Qatada would not be held to trial with evidence obtained via torture.
After many tens of millions were spent on the case, and Qatada was extradited to Jordan with a guarantee of a fair trial, he was a few months ago found not guilty.
It's a prime example of a case whereby governments try to bypass fair trials to get the outcome they want but are thwarted by human rights law, only for the individual to be found to be innocent all along when they finally get the fair trial they deserve.
Sweden's actions are out of the ordinary in that they both insist the case is important enough to pursue and not be dropped, but not important enough to focus on public interest reduction of prosecution costs by either questioning Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy which is something Sweden has done in other cases, or to give him a legal guarantee of no onwards extradition to the US. These are both things that contrary to the lies floating round otherwise they can and have done previously in other cases.
In situations like this countries make one of two choices - they decide a case is worth pursuing and do everything in their power, such as the option of giving certain legal guarantees as in the Jordan-UK Abu Qatada case, or they decide the case isn't important enough to pursue and drop it. What is abnormal is to just have the costs continue to rack up indefinitely whilst there are many means available to stop that happening and to resolve the issue.
I know each time the Assange story comes up you like to jump on it because the whole thing is personal for you (I haven't forgotten the last time you lost the plot on the issue, don't worry), but you seem to be making things up that aren't even there, which is a new low even for you. The story states very clearly that he was convicted in absentia, not simply that he was simply awaiting an appeal when he died, using Swedish translations of common words like "prosecute" doesn't add weight to your case by the way, it just makes you look even more desperate in your argument.
"And the British court system has at every level ruled Assange to be in a state equivalent to charged under the British legal system."
What the British court has ruled is that he can be extradited under the extremely lax checks of the European Arrest Warrant, something which is a major bone of contention in the UK and has been the target of much political preference for removal by MPs and precisely because it's such an utterly stupid piece of law in the first place. Pretending stupid law somehow adds weight to your overriding bias that Assange is a rapist is another example of your further highlighting the stupidity of your argument.
"But do you somehow know more about Swedish and British law..."
What I know is that not all these things are in agreement, so to try and stack them together to add weight to your argument is again, a further example of the weakness of your argument. I know for example that the prosecutor your refer to when stating her case in British court actually admitted that Assange could indeed be interviewed and charged here under the MLA framework (exactly like they did for this guy in Serbia: http://www.expressen.se/nyhete...), but simply insisted that she be able to do so in person in Sweden regardless.
What I also know is that whilst I may not be a professor of Swedish law, that professors of Swedish law also completely disagree with you, so your appeal to authority fallacy fails miserably in the face of a similar but opposite appeal to authority:
http://sverigesradio.se/sida/a...
Another thing I know is that the British courts regularly get such human rights issues wrong, they spent 10 years restricting the liberties of Abu Qatada only for him to be found innocent when he finally got to Jordan, and there have been many other cases where British courts got such issues wrong. The idea you're pushing that they consistently get such issues right, and aren't ever swayed by politics is demonstrable false, again, as in the Abu Qatada case. The British justice system is imperfect and easily manipulated by politics, in fact, the whole reason we have a Supreme Court is because politicians wanted an overriding court with a politically appointed judge panel precisely so that politics could play a part in justice, which is yet one more thing that shows how utterly laughable your appeal to authority fallacy is in this respect.
So Rei, I think you should accept what you accepted last time this discussion came up, that this issue is one that is too personal for you, and that in Rei land a man accused is a man guilty is a man convicted is not how things should work in the real world. In the real world we like justice and due process, if that isn't being followed, which it isn't - because the Swedish prosecution are insisting on avoiding processes that could resolve this issue fairly and objectively, then there's a problem.
I really could not care if Assange is found guilty or not, I have no presumption of innocence unlike your presumption and insistence of guilt, I think there's a fair chance he may well be guilty all the same. I appreciate some of the things he has talked about and some of his goals, but that's by the by, I appreciated some of the things Rolf Harris did but it doesn't change the fact it's all overshadowed b