Or you know, he could let the justice system run its course.
(That's the part I never understood... why would there be a need to spirit Assange from a Five Eyes country and very close ally of the US to one that is not before springing a surprise extradition?)
My understanding is that Assange and allies allege that there is probably a sealed one, and that there is a (leaked in Stratfor emails) sealed US indictment against him.
Entirely biased source: https://www.justice4assange.com/US-Extradition.html
You're asking the parent to prove a negative, which is impossible. No public extradition request has ever been filed-- indeed, the United States has never so much as commented on it-- and so the burden of proof is on you to show that there is such a request. And no, links on "justice4assange.com" aren't convincing
It's reasonable that the UK Government may not agree if the appearance is bad and would cause political backlash. It's also possible that they're harder to lean on than as smaller, weaker, lower GDP government.
I mean, it could be as simple as "they won't agree, but other guys might". Maybe someone in US Gov has a better relationship with the person/people in Sweden that would need to approve things. Maybe someone owes someone else a favor.
All of these are reasonable possibilities. Governments aren't 1 dimensional.
Under EU law, if Assange was extradited from the UK to Sweden, then both the UK and Sweden would have to approve of him being re-extradited to the UK. So either the UK will approve of Assange being extradited (and extraditing to Sweden isn't needed) or they won't (and extraditing to Sweden won't help).
To speculate, perhaps the US's original plan was to waiting for Assange to make his own way to a more pliant jurisdiction, and the whole Sweden case caught the US by surprise as well.
As soon as Assange ended up in the Ecuadorian embassy, the US would have had no incentive to file for extradition.
1. The UK will not assent to to Assange's extradition to the US, so extraditing him to Sweden will protect him from extradition.
2. The UK will assent to Assange's extradition, but for mysterious reasons, they didn't just hand him over, when he was in their custody. Despite their status as a close ally of the US, and their long standing history of handing over anyone the US asks for, no questions asked (Gary McKinnon, Richard O'Dwyer, the NatWest Three, and many more).
Plus, neither the UK nor Sweden can legally extradite him to the US without a binding assurance that the death penalty will not be sought, so...yeah. The more you think about it, the less sense extradition makes as an explanation for the Swedish problems.
If extradition was going to happen, it would have happened when Assange was in British custody (and it didn't) or it would happen after Assange left the EU and was in a more pliant jurisdiction (ie, not Sweden).
That's a very good point that I hadn't seen made before.
> neither the UK nor Sweden can legally extradite him to the US without a binding assurance that the death penalty will not be sought
I'm not sure that "life in jail" (particularly an american jail) is much preferable... The US has been known to give those assurances.
I'm no big fan of that man but there are so many questions around this investigation that I have serious problems believing most of the official story.
This kind of snark is obnoxious and never adds anything.
I'm generally a huge fan of European police and think they often don’t get enough credit for the work they do.
That said, in this particular case there is a number of red flags for me, e.g.:
- generally Scandinavian police won't go to these lengths for cases like this. Why this time?
- why wouldn't they even meet him in the embassy until their deadlines started approaching? If I was trying to sort a case big enough to require extradition requests then flying to London to interview would be a no-brainer.
See: Martha Stewart. Trotsky. Etc...
I characterized your snark as obnoxious not obvious.