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Crucial UK extradition hearing for Assange

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange hopes to avoid extradition to Sweden by having his case heard by Britain's High Court of Justice, the final card in a legal battle that has lasted almost a year.

Crucial UK extradition hearing for Assange

Almost a year after his arrest over claims of rape and sexual assault, the 40-year-old Australian will ask two judges at London’s High Court to decide whether his appeal can proceed to the Supreme Court.

For the appeal to be heard in Britain’s highest court, the judges must rule the case raises a question of general public importance.

Monday’s hearing comes a month after his first appeal against a ruling that he can be sent to Sweden was rejected.

If the ruling goes against Assange, the British leg of his legal battle will end and he faces extradition to Sweden within 10 days, an outcome that would mark a new low for the former hacker after a string of controversies.

Swedish police want to quiz Assange over allegations made by two Swedish women of sex crimes, which he strongly denies.

Assange claims the allegations are politically motivated and linked to the activities of his anti-secrecy website, which angered the United States by publishing thousands of classified documents.

He has already appeared nine times in British courts since his detention under a European Arrest Warrant on December 7 last year.

He has spent much of the last year under virtual house arrest on a supporter’s country estate in eastern England, where he has had to stick to strict bail conditions.

A lower court initially approved Assange’s extradition in February, but he appealed to the High Court which rejected his challenge on November 2.

Assange made the application for the Supreme Court to hear the case one day before the legal time limit.

The judiciary of England and Wales said the High Court would “consider Julian Assange’s application for a certificate of law of general public importance on 5 December.”

Legal sources said a decision was expected on the same day but that it was not certain.

According to the website Sweden Vs. Assange, which supports his case, his legal team will question whether a European Arrest Warrant issued by a state prosecutor is valid.

They will also query whether he can be defined as “accused” despite having not been prosecuted, the website added.

Assange has previously expressed fears that his extradition to Sweden would lead to his transfer to the United States to face as yet unspecified charges of spying.

The legal challenge comes despite the fact that a Swedish public relations firm claimed last week that it had been hired by Assange and that he would soon be returning to Sweden to face questioning over the allegations.

Swedish prosecutors want to question Assange on suspicion of two counts of sexual molestation and an accusation of rape made by two Swedish women in August 2010.

If the High Court fails to back his appeal bid on Monday, it will be another blow for Assange after his fortunes deteriorated dramatically in the past year.

When he was arrested, WikiLeaks was riding high having just started releasing more than 250,000 classified US diplomatic cables, following the earlier publication of US military files on the war in Afghanistan.

But support for the eccentric, platinum blond WikiLeaks chief has faded amid a welter of controversies.

Former WikiLeaks colleagues have turned on him, attacking the way he ran the site. He also fell out with newspapers, including the New York Times and Britain’s Guardian, that WikiLeaks initially worked with to release documents.

WikiLeaks’ work has come under threat, with the site forced to suspend releasing files in October after a funding blockade.

It resumed publication Thursday, however, with the launch of a project on the global surveillance industry.

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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

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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