Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ben_w | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

If Assange had gone to Sweden in 2010, and been found guilty and gone to prison, he might have finished his sentence before the USA officially decided to try him with their 2017 (?) indictment.

Even if he was still in prison, Sweden is at least as capable of resisting USA extradition requests as the UK.

Even if he wasn’t in prison/an embassy (either not guilty or guilty and released after doing time), the indictment would’ve happened anyway, and led to another extradition attempt anyway wherever he was — including, I recon, if he went straight from Sweden to Ecuador, given that Ecuador did remove his asylum.

Either way, his conditions would’ve been better between them and now, but also the situation right now would be the same (except for the time spent in a UK prison for breach of bail, and held by the authorities while waiting for an extradition hearing, and the loss of bail bond money from his supporters) except that either he would be exonerated from sexual assault charges or a dangerous narcissistic rapist would’ve been punished with a prison sentence rather than allowed to present themselves as a victim [delete as appropriate].

If he had been tried in Sweden in 2010, and there were no political machinations, he'd have been out probably by 2013-2015. Sentences in Sweden are short across the board - you can find even convictions for violent rapes in Sweden that results in sentences no longer than that.

But that rests on a lot of assumptions, such as that there wouldn't have been an earlier US indictment if he'd been conveniently accessible.

And of course it rests on the assumption that Sweden would have been as "capable of resisting" extradition. Which is a big question - one of the results of "Cablegate" was that we know that years after the Swedish government found out Swedish police was complicit in blatantly illegal rendition of two political asylum seekers who were afterwards tortured after being handed over to the government they were fleeing, the US was chastised secretly by the Swedish government after Swedish military intelligence caught Swedes assisting illegal rendition flights via Sweden. Nobody were ever tried for either incident. So it's not clear whether or not Sweden is even capable of stopping the US from unilaterally doing as it pleases, before even consider whether Sweden would want to.

I'm inclined to think the oddities in the Swedish case was down to domestic Swedish issues rather than US involvement, but at the same time I know for my part if I had feared US prosecution, I'd much rather stay in the UK than go to Sweden.

Hm. Well, I view the current extradition process as evidence the UK isn’t going to try very hard to stop him going to the USA: If the UK authorities did have that intent, I would’ve expected them to inform Sweden about the end of Assange’s asylum and given them a chance to reopen their case before the USA got to start a new one, but the complainants were reportedly surprised by the events.

Then again, I left the UK because I no longer trust the UK government to do good, so naturally I must be unusual in my belief about the UK…

Sweden does not offer habeus corpus to detainees who are under investigation but have not been charged. This is the category in which they placed Assange.

https://wikileaks.org/Sweden-Tells-the-UN-that.html

The Swedish desire to maneuver Assange into a black hole is self-evident in its refusal to interview Assange by telephone. Once that was done they would have had to charge him and present their evidence to the public under Swedish law.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com