Sunday, February 27, 2011

London Court grants Assange Swedish extradition request

Judge Howard Riddle took just over an hour for the issue of dismissal of the radical defense arguments team — from arcane technical points dark tips that Mr. Assange they would not receive a fair trial in Sweden and could also deal with extradition in the United States, imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison and possibly death.

The judge said that Mr. Assange seemed to have been "deliberately avoiding interrogation" when he left Sweden in September, following allegations by two women in Stockholm that he had sexually abused them. Strict laws-sex crimes of Sweden, is charged with two counts of sexual harassment, unlawful compulsion and seeds of rape. His accusers, both volunteers from WikiLeaks, they said that their sexual encounters with Mr. Assange began as consensual and nonconsensual transformed.

Given the circumstances, said judge Riddle, Swedish prosecutors had every right to issue a mandate last December for his arrest and return.

Mr. Assange, an Australian 39 years, was unmoved, but pale as the judgment has been pronounced. Outside the Court, described the decision as "a process giving it" and reiterated its determination to fight the decision.

The verdict signals a new phase in a battle in the courts and media against what Mr. Assange, his legal team and its supporters of celebrities have interpreted as a conspiracy to shut WikiLeaks from exposure to Government and business secrets.

The case was bitterly unleashed in the context of the operation of the Group's highest profile yet — the release of a quarter of a million confidential American diplomatic cables that became the basis of articles from news organizations around the world, including The New York Times.

WikiLeaks supporters mobbed courts initially during the hearings acrimonious six, chanting, "We love you, Julian," when Mr. Assange was denied bail as a flight risk and briefly imprisoned in December after defying a court request to provide an address. At the hearing on Thursday, their numbers had dwindled to about a dozen.

Mr. Assange said that the accusations are "amazing" lies "and leaked documents on the case and comment from Swedish officials, Justice preclude for him.

Judge Riddle, Thursday said that if there had been abused in Sweden, "the right place for these to be examined and resolved is in the Swedish system of evidence".

The long and costly legal battle looks set to continue for months, with Mr. Assange essentially limited to the country residence of a wealthy friend as a condition of his bail.

Because allegations emerged, many of his closest collaborators have defected from WikiLeaks, and a dozen of them formed a rival website, OpenLeaks. The Department of Justice of the United States, meanwhile, has subpoenaed Twitter account of Mr. Assange as part of an investigation which could lead to accusations of spying.

Although its infrastructure essentially has been disabled for defections, WikiLeaks has continued to post classified United States diplomatic cables from the cache that had already achieved. Documents on the opulent lifestyle of the family of former President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia were widely disseminated during the revolution that ousted Mr. Ben Ali, has started a wave of protests in the Arab world.

Mr. Assange said friends in Britain who feared that extradition in Sweden would be a step towards the prosecution on American soil for his work with WikiLeaks. But a former colleague said in an interview that he thought the concerns of Mr. Assange had more immediate.

My colleague, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, one of the founders of OpenLeaks, told reporters last week that Mr. Assange first time heard of allegations of sexual abuse at the end of August, "he wasn't worried about the United States."

Mr. Domscheit-Berg "Was very scared of going to prison in Sweden," he said, "that he thought would happen".

If the appeals of Mr. Assange and he returned to Sweden, the procedures of the country will not allow bail, and is likely to be imprisoned in the city of Gothenburg was told the British Court.

If convicted, he could receive a maximum sentence of four years.

Richard Berry contributed reporting from Paris.

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