Slashdot Mirror
Swedish Authorities Offer To Question Assange In London
An anonymous reader writes: Since 2012, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been holed up inside Ecuador's embassy in London trying to avoid extradition to Sweden, where he faces a sexual assault investigation. Now, after the case has been stalled for years, Swedish prosecutors are arranging to come to London and question Assange within the embassy. According to his lawyer, Assange welcomes this, but Sweden still needs to be granted permission from both the UK and Ecuador. "Assange's lawyers, who are appealing against his arrest warrant in Sweden's highest court, have complained bitterly about the prosecutor's refusal to travel to London to speak to him – an essential step under Swedish jurisprudence to establish whether Assange can be formally charged. [Lead investigator Marianne] Ny's refusal, they say, has condemned Assange to severe limitations on his freedom that are disproportionate to the accusations against him." Ny has also requested a DNA sample from Assange.
But only in Sweden is regret considered retroactive rape.
No. At most universities in the US, regret can also be considered retroactive rape. See the Emma Sulkowicz case at Columbia University.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/02/03/columbia-student-i-didn-t-rape-her.html
The UK doesn't care about the cost of guarding that embassy 24/7. That's a trivial cost to them to keep their U.S. masters happy.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
F*ing a sleeping girl is to work around her refusal to consent to one's preferred form of sex - entry #4 on Assange's EAW - is rape in almost every jurisdiction in the first world. And the UK court system has - at multiple levels - upheld that all four entries on the EAW match up to equivalent British charges. And a full court hearing in the Svea Court of Appeals, including testimony from Assange's attorneys, has gone over the evidence and found probable cause on all four counts. Heck, one of Assange's attorneys (Emerson) all but admitted that he did it.
Sweden actually has rather unusually lax penalties in this regard compared to most places. If Assange was convicted of doing that in DC then he'd be facing a 10x longer maximum sentence than in Sweden. In fact, Sweden's rape laws in general are pretty lax. There was a rape case a while back where a teenage girl was gang-raped by a group of three men; however, only the first could be charged because, having been beaten into submission by him, she had stopped resisting by the time that the other two got to her.
Anyway, for the case at hand here, it's amazing that the Slashdot header didn't mention the actual stated reason why the prosecutor is doing this: because the statute of limitations on some of the lesser charges** runs out this year (the statute on the rape charge** doesn't run out until 2020). Thus he has to be indicted**, of which this questioning is a legal requirement (he's only been questioned on some of the charges before he fled***, all other communication has been through Q and A via his attorneys). This will pose some challenges, as in general in Sweden, once indicted**, there's a time limit on when the case must go to trial, but if he still refuses to hand himself over, he could run this out. But the prosecutor's office may be able to extend that, we'll have to see.
** I use here "charged" in the case of "anklagad" and "indict" in the case of "åtala". They don't exactly match up to English words, and a lot of Assange fans like to play this word game where they say he's not been "charged" and use that as an excuse for why he should be able to go free. But in Sweden, the process is that one gets formally anklagad by the processor and a judge issues a warrant (following the same sort of process as a charged person in the US or UK), and then once in custody and sufficient evidence has been gathered for prosecution, they're åtalad, which brings the case to trial. You're anklagad to get you in custody, åtalad to try to convict you.
*** Yes, he did flee. The claim that Assange was "free to go" as promulgated by Björn Hurtig, a former attorney of Assange's. He tried that same line in court and got smacked down by the judge for trying to deceive the court, and then got an official reprimand from the Swedish Bar Association.
"Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." -- Primer
February, 2011: Strauss-Kahn, head of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), begins to call for a new global currency to supplant the U.S. Dollar (widely held as the current global standard, to the great benefit of the U.S. of course).
May, 2011: Strauss-Kahn is publicly dragged off a plane in NYC in handcuffs and paraded in front of the press, in what the NY prosecutor calls a "rock solid" case of sexual assault. Strauss-Khan is shortly thereafter forced to resign as head of the IMF.
June, 2011 Christine Lagarde is sworn in as the new IMF chief after an endorsement from U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. She mentions nothing further of any new global currencies to challenge the Dollar.
August, 2011: All charges are dropped against Strauss-Kahn. The NY prosecutor admits that he has no case and that the accuser's story doesn't hold water.
March, 2013: Some Slashdot jackass can't spot the obvious real story here.
Once again, Assange fans demonstrate their total ignorance of everything related to the case.
"They dozed off and she awoke and felt him penetrating her." - SW's testimony
"After that, SW told HR that she was feeling worse and worse. She said that the problem was that Assange had had unprotected sex with her while she was sleeping. SW also said that Assange had nagged her and tried to have unprotected sex with her during the night, but that she had made him wear a condom. SW had told Assange several times to wear a condom. SW also told HR that Assange had spoken so strangely, as though he wanted SW to become pregnant. He said things that sounded like he wanted to make women pregnant. He reportedly said that he preferred virgins, because then he would be the first to make them pregnant." -- HR's testimony (friend of SW since childhood)
"SW had said that Assange wanted to have sex with her, and that SW had said that she did not want to have sex without a condom. SW also said that, when she was half asleep on her side, she had been aroused from slumber to feel that Assange was inside her. SW had then asked him what he was wearing and he had replied, “I am wearing you”. The witness said that SW did not believe that he had entered her; rather, she had been aroused from slumber when he was already inside her." - KS's testimony (close colleague of SW)
"He learned about what had happened from SW and his mother. The latter had said that Julian had sex with SW without a condom and against her will as she slept." - KW's testimony (SW's brother)
"Then Sofia said that she had been raped by Julian Assange, in that he had initiated unprotected sex with her while she lay sleeping." - SB's testimony (old friend and one time boyfriend of SW)
Where does your ridiculous "she was just sleepy" claim come from? It's an echo-chamber morphing of a claim from Assange's attorney, which was based on the "half asleep" line in KS's testimony. But KS continued, "she had been aroused from slumber to feel that Assange was inside her."
False. There was shopping and breakfast - but it came before the reported assault. Here's the descriptions of that from the leaked testimony:
"Earlier, she had fetched some condoms and laid them on the floor by the bed. He reluctantly agreed to use a condom, although he muttered that he preferred her to latex. He no longer had an erection problem. At one point when he took her from behind, she turned to look at him and smiled and he asked her why she was smiling, what had she to smile about. She did not like the undertone of his voice. They fell asleep, and when they woke up they may have had sex again; she does not really remember. He ordered her to fetch him some water and orange juice. She did not like being ordered about in her own home, but thought “what the hell” and fetched the liquids anyway. He wanted her to go out and buy more breakfast. She did not want to leave him alone in the flat — she really did not know him very well — but she did it anyway. When she left the flat he lay naked in her bed and was fiddling with one of his telephones. Before she left she said, “Be good'”. He replied: “Don't worry, I'm always bad”. When she returned she served him oatmeal porridge, milk, and juice. She had already eaten before he awoke, and had spoken with a friend on the phone." - SW's testimony
"While sleeping on the night of the episode, MT was awakened by an SMS message from SW. MT's recollection of that message is that it was not positive — that the sex was not goo
"Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon." -- Primer
I guess most of us (yes, I'm Swedish) find it much more plausible that the decision came after the court having told the prosecutor that she did not fulfil the reasonability requirement for handling the investigation.
That happened this Tuesday.
På tisdagen bestämde Högsta domstolen att Riksåklagaren ska skicka in en svarsskrivelse i målet. Riksåklagaren ska där förklara hur utredningsarbetet ska fortsätta – speciellt när det gäller frågan om proportionalitetsprincipen.
Enligt principen ska olika intressen vägas mot varandra och åtgärder ska inte gå utöver det som är nödvändigt med hänsyn till ändamålet. Det kan till exempel gälla samhällets krav på säkerhet mot individens rätt till integritet.
http://www.expressen.se/nyhete...
Marianne Ny had no choice after this but to finally do what Swedish prosecutors do all the time - question people abroad.
(Looking at your post history on the subject of Assange your bias is extremely visible)
it's in my head