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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

But now the UK government can surrender that right to prosecute him if they want to. The political responsibility is pretty clear at this point.

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Why? He had the opportunity to appeal all the way to the UK Supreme Court who ruled that the extradition request was valid. Those who pledged surety over his bail were ordered to pay £93,500 back in 2012. This absolutely should not be about politics but about the rule of law.

There is a serious point as well that bail needs to be enforced otherwise its effectiveness is reduced, which in turn makes it easier for the arguments limiting the right to bail to be made. Assange has made it more likely that future defendants will be denied bail.

> This absolutely should not be about politics but about the rule of law.

But it is about politics. No other bail-skipper in recent memory was ever granted the attention and resources that the UK police granted to the Assange case. It's also pretty clear by now that the Swedish charges were overblown, with very strong suggestions that it was done for political reasons. Hiding behind procedures will not change that.

A "strong and stable" government, relishing its independence from foreign states, would drop this in a second and reconsider its procedures for future cases, so that other countries cannot abuse UK law to enforce bogus prosecutions. In the context of Brexit and the noise about "security cooperation", this would also be a strong message.

>It's also pretty clear by now that the Swedish charges were overblown, with very strong suggestions that it was done for political reasons.

That's not clear at all and there are no such strong suggestions from any reputable source. Assange has not been charged with anything in Sweden, he was merely wanted for questioning before any such charges could be made. People suggesting Sweden wanted him back just to hand him over to the US don't know what they are talking about, no matter how strong they are suggesting it.

Has there been any kind of comparable instance though? Had he skipped bail by just not showing up we could compare the manhunt that happened with any other bail skipper. But his location was very publicly known - what would a reasonable government do in that situation in your view?

As you say, this is not a simple criminal case - criminals don't broadcast their location when skipping bail. So you have to deal with it politically. A reasonable government would have done that a long time ago, getting Sweden to change its stance sooner (as it eventually happened anyway, like most people asked for and predicted, since it had been done before). Once that is sorted, you can liquidate it all as "a big misunderstanding" without losing face.

Unfortunately now it's very late, and I find it hard to believe the person responsible for this stupid position in the first place, currently leading the country, will do anything smart to resolve this for good.

So a politically significant person should be able to leverage their celebrity and status to avoid a rape charge?

I don't see how that even comes close to being a good faith reading of toyg's point. Assange's "celebrity", to the extent that we can even use a term like that to describe him in this context, flows from the political controversy surrounding him. Calling it celebrity abstracts away the political nature of Assange's status which is critical to any consideration of the charges against him.

No one is suggesting that a celebrity like Drake could apply for political asylum at an Ecuadorian embassy to avoid rape charges. But if that's what you're taking away from the argument it's probably worth reading it again and engaging with more good faith.

But isn't the lack of comparable cases exactly the point?

It was claimed upthread that "Assange has made it more likely that future defendants will be denied bail." That sounds good, except that Assange skipped bail by getting political asylum. It's not exactly a generalizable argument against bail, and even within the context of leakers it appears unprecedented. The case is exceptional, which is what makes it politicized and irrelevant to 'normal' bail skip situations.

Regardless of why Assange was wanted, we can still say it's political when Britain threatened to storm a foreign embassy to recover an asylum-seeker. That's an inherently political decision, in the sense that no domestic police force in the Western world would do it without political guidance.

None of which is to say what's true in Assange's case. But I'm not impressed by the arguments "now everyone can beat rape charges by receiving asylum and spending 5 years trapped in a foreign embassy" and "threatening to raid an embassy to capture an asylum grantee is apolitical".

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-wikileaks-assange-ecuador-...

Naive

Is the risk that an accused on bail can be granted political asylum a reason to deny bail for future defendants?

In the history of UK, how many times have this set of circumstances happed?

Applying for asylum is also part of the rule of law. It was granted based on real concerns. Since backed up by UN legal experts who found in his favour.

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