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JULIAN ASSANGE

Assange ‘offered to come to Sweden’: lawyer

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange repeatedly offered to be interviewed in Sweden last year over allegations of rape and molestation, his Swedish lawyer told a British court on Tuesday.

Published: 9 February 2011 07:59 CET
Assange 'offered to come to Sweden': lawyer

On the second day of his extradition hearing in a London court, lawyers for Assange attacked Sweden’s attempts to extradite him from Britain, saying prosecutors had failed to follow correct procedure.

The hearing, initially scheduled to last two days, will now reconvene on Friday when lawyers will make closing statements, although the judge in the case is not expected to give his decision until later this month.

Assange was arrested in Britain in December on an international warrant issued by Sweden.

Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny wants to question Assange over allegations of sexual assault made by two women he met during a seminar organised by the whistleblowing website in August last year.

Assange denies the allegations made by the two women and insists they are politically motivated, stemming from WikiLeaks’ release of thousands of classified US cables which has enraged Washington.

The 39-year-old Australian is afraid that extradition to Sweden will lead to him eventually being delivered to the United States, where some politicians have called for him to face the death penalty for leaking state secrets.

Assange’s Swedish lawyer told the packed courtroom on Tuesday that it was “wrong” for Ny to claim it had been impossible to contact his client.

Björn Hurtig said he had contacted the prosecutor on five occasions in September and October “and offered that Julian could be interrogated in Sweden — I would even say I requested it”.

He said he later proposed that Ny could interview Assange by other means, such as by video-link, or that police in Britain be allowed to interview him.

“But she said no to everything,” Hurtig said.

Sven-Erik Alhem, a former Swedish prosecutor who gave evidence for the WikiLeaks founder, accused Swedish prosecutors of failing to follow “proper procedure” while investigating the rape claims.

It was “quite peculiar” that authorities failed to get Assange’s version of events before seeking his arrest, he claimed.

After Tuesday’s evidence at Belmarsh Magistrates Court, Assange’s lawyer in Britain pleaded with Swedish prosecutor Ny to come to court in London on Friday and argue her case.

“We have seen a prosecutor who has been ready to feed the media with information but has been unprepared to come here and subject herself to the cross-examination she knows she cannot withstand,” Mark Stephens told reporters.

Sweden’s prime minister took issue with the description of his country’s judiciary system presented by Assange’s lawyers.

Fredrik Reinfeldt said accusations by Assange’s lawyers that his human rights would be violated if he stood trial for rape in Sweden were “the kind of thing you hear when (a lawyer) trying to defend a client gives a condescending description of other countries’ legal systems.

“But everyone living in Sweden knows that is not in line with the truth,” he told reporters in Stockholm.

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OPINION AND ANALYSIS

OPINION: Sweden must demand that Julian Assange go free

Given Sweden’s involvement in the Assange case, the government’s continued silence over his impending extradition to the US is indefensible, says David Crouch

Published: 17 June 2022 13:37 CEST
OPINION: Sweden must demand that Julian Assange go free

I have no personal fondness for Julian Assange. I cannot forgive him for not condemning the torrent of abuse and slander suffered by the two Swedish women who, in 2010, accused him of sexual assault. His treatment of them has been shameful. Assange has continued to protest his innocence and has not expressed any regret for what happened. 

But that was then and this is now. At stake is something much bigger than the fate of one man and two women. And the Swedish government bears a clear share of responsibility for the outcome. 

Sweden’s prosecutors dropped the sexual assault investigation against Assange in 2017. For more than three years, he has been held in a maximum security prison in London while he has fought extradition to the United States on espionage charges. In April, a British court finally approved the extradition and referred the matter to the Home Secretary, Priti Patel. 

Today (June 17), Patel gave the green light for extradition; Assange has 14 days to appeal. 

Extradition would be a colossal blow against media freedom. Journalists would fear to investigate US military and surveillance operations around the world. Assange himself faces a lifetime in jail for publishing classified documents about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including evidence of war crimes. 

Many Swedish free speech organisations recognise this. “The information obtained thanks to Julian Assange and Wikileaks is of great public interest. In a democracy, whistleblowers must be protected, not taken to court to become pawns in a political game,” says the Swedish Journalists’ Association. A large number of press freedom and human right organisations have echoed these words, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Index on Censorship, to name but a few.

“Should Assange be extradited to the US, it could have serious consequences for investigative journalism,” says the Swedish branch of Reporters without Borders. “Through the indictment of Assange, the US is also sending a signal to all journalists who want to examine the actions of the US military and security services abroad, or US arms deals for that matter. This also applies to Swedish journalists.”

Last month, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights, Dunja Mijatović, called on Patel not to extradite Assange, saying it would have “a chilling effect on media freedom”.  Anna Ardin, one of the women who brought the original accusations of sexual assault, describes the accusations against Assange for espionage as “helt galet” (completely crazy). 

Given Sweden’s involvement in the Assange case, the continued silence from Rosenbad, the seat of government offices in Stockholm, is indefensible. 

For the seven years in which Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, he said consistently and repeatedly that he was prepared to face justice in Sweden, but feared extradition to the United States and therefore required a guarantee that this would not happen. His treatment in the UK is proof that his fears were justified. 

As early as September 2012, The Local quoted Amnesty International on this matter: “If the Swedish authorities are able to confirm publicly that Assange will not eventually find himself on a plane to the USA if he submits himself to the authority of the Swedish courts then this will … it will break the current impasse and second it will mean the women who have levelled accusations of sexual assault are not denied justice.”

And yet, throughout, Sweden’s Ministry of Justice kept quiet. Instead, the Swedish Prosecution Authority stated repeatedly: “Every extradition case is to be judged on its own individual merits. For that reason the Swedish government cannot provide a guarantee in advance that Julian Assange would not be subject to further extradition to the USA.”

In 2016, a United Nations panel decided that Sweden had violated the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It called on the Swedish authorities to end Assange’s “deprivation of liberty”, respect his freedom of movement and offer him compensation. Again, the government itself remained silent, although Sweden’s director-general for legal affairs said that it disagreed with the panel.

Freedom of speech is one of the four “fundamental laws” that make up the Swedish constitution. There can be no excuse now for Morgan Johansson, Justice Minister, not to speak out in defence of Assange’s role as a whistleblower and journalist. 

Imagine if Assange had revealed Russian war crimes in Ukraine and was being held in Moscow’s high security prison? Every Western leader would be up in arms. 

Assange’s wife Stella Moris has Swedish citizenship. Her life, and that of their two children, will be destroyed if her husband, their father, is sent to rot in a US jail.

At this point in time, when Sweden’s independence in global affairs is in doubt owing to pressure from Turkey over its application to join Nato, it is even more vital for the government to break its silence and help bring the persecution of Julian Assange to an end. 

David Crouch covered Julian Assange’s campaign in the Swedish courts for The Guardian newspaper and is among 1900 journalists to have signed a statement in his defence. He is a freelance journalist and a lecturer in journalism at Gothenburg University.

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