I'd like to remind people that Julian Assange has now spent 10 years in prison in the UK, despite the Swedish authorities having investigated the alleged rape allegations twice now, and dropped the investigation without any charges both times. The UK has effectively held him besieged or in actual prison for 10 years 'for breaking his bail conditions', and is still incarcerating him to give yet more time for the Americans to fabricate some excuse to drag him off to a federal hole in the ground in the midwest for the rest of his miserable existence.
I know a lot of you don't like him, and feel he should be punished for something, but how likely is it that a future Assange would dare to publish information which we need and have a right to know after the treatment meted out to him pour encourager les autres ?
I suspect this post will go down like a lead balloon...
I'm sorry, but he's in a predicament entirely of his own making.
He was initially held in custody for 10 days or so, after his initial arrest on the Swedish rape charges, and then granted bail, which he spent at a friend's country house and estate.
He then jumped bail and refused to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy for almost 7 years.
When the Embassy eventually threw him out, he was -- quite rightly, to my mind -- given the maximum sentence for his Bail Act offence, and then the US delivered their extradition request.
Obviously no English court is going to risk granting him bail a second time, after he proved his promises to the court and to his friends (now former, in many cases) who stood surety for him, so he remains in custody while the courts consider the extradition request.
I don't see what else you say the British government and courts should have done -- while on bail he was able to argue, at great length and all the way up to the Supreme Court and the European Court of Human Rights, against the Swedish extradition request, but -- quite rightly in my view -- none of the courts accepted his arguments about how the charges didn't really amount to a crime in English law (using arguments more usually associated with lawyers defending wealthy US fraternity boys on similar charges), and neither did they accept his argument that the request was a covert attempt to get him into the clutches of the US because he never made it to any of the courts.
The same process is now taking place with the US request but, while I certainly hope that this time his appeals will be successful, since no matter how you view Assange's and Wikileaks' activities, the extradition request seems to criminalise what most of us would regard as legitimate investigative journalism, because he's demonstrated he can't be trusted not to abscond, he's got to remain in custody while the case is heard.
What's your proposed remedy? Let the Home Secretary decide on extradition requests, without reference to the courts? That would certainly speed things up a bit, though not with results many of us would want. Don't extradite people at all?
I'm sorry, but his problems are very much of his own making, and no matter how sorry I may feel for anyone who spectacularly messes up his life through his own arrogance and stupidity (which I used to see a lot, in the criminal justice system), I just don't see what else should happen -- "the law shouldn't apply to him because he's Julian Assange" is no sort of argument, though it's one you see a lot from his supporters.
