It now
emerges that the last four years of Julian Assange’s effective
imprisonment in the Ecuadorean embassy in London have been entirely
unnecessary. In fact, they depended on a legal charade.
Behind
the scenes, Sweden wanted to drop the extradition case against
Assange back in 2013. Why was this not made public? Because Britain
persuaded Sweden to pretend that they still wished to pursue the
case.
In other
words, for more than four years Assange has been holed up in a tiny
room, policed at great cost to British taxpayers, not because of any
allegations in Sweden but because the British authorities wanted him
to remain there. On what possible grounds could that be, one has to
wonder? Might it have something to do with his work as the head of
Wikileaks, publishing information from whistleblowers that has
severely embarrassed the United States and the UK.
In fact,
Assange should have walked free years ago if this was really about an
investigation – a sham one at that – into an alleged sexual
assault in Sweden. Instead, as Assange has long warned, there is a
very different agenda at work: efforts to extradite him onwards to
the US, where he could be locked away for good. That was why UN
experts argued two years ago that he was being “arbitrarily
detained” – for political crimes – not unlike the situation of
dissidents in other parts of the world that win the support of
western liberals and leftists.
According
to a new, limited release of emails between officials, the Swedish
director of public prosecutions, Marianne Ny, wrote to Britain’s
Crown Prosecution Service on 18 October 2013, warning that Swedish
law would not allow the case for extradition to be continued. This
was, remember, after Sweden had repeatedly failed to take up an offer
from Assange to interview him in London, as had happened in 44 other
extradition cases between Sweden and Britain.
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