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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.
Yea Snowden really took his thunder away.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
>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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
...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
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.
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.
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
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.
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When a bunch of powerful people want to quietly vanish you, staying in the public's awareness could save your life.
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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
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