Assange fears extradition to US
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by Laura Lynch
Assange at British manor house
This morning, he crossed the snowswept lawn of a grand manor house in Suffolk to meet with reporters. The house belongs to a friend and, it’s where the court has ordered Assange to remain until the Swedish extradition request is resolved. Sweden wants Assange for questioning in a sexual assault case.
One of Assange’s lawyers, Helena Kennedy, said they’ll fight the case in part by arguing that Sweden is abusing the law. “What we are concerned about here is what they want Julian Assange for is not to prosecute him, but to interview him to decide whether to prosecute him,” she said. “We’re not satisfied that the extradition procedures under the European arrest warrant allow for that.”
Assange himself calls the rape allegations a smear. He said today that he’s more worried about suggestions that U.S. authorities are preparing an indictment against him. “We need proactive legal attacks on these institutions that are engaged in what appears to be certainly a secret investigation, but also an illegal investigation.”
Assange and Wikileaks have retained lawyers in the US and Assange said he’s heard the reports that US prosecutors are trying to establish a link between him and Private Bradley Manning, the military analyst now in jail.
Key to the case would be showing that Assange actually helped Manning to remove and distribute classified information. So today, Assange made a point of saying he never knew Manning or his name until he read it in a newspaper.
“Of course WikiLeaks is designed to not know who its sources are,” he said. “the best way for us to protect them is to never know.”
Even if the U.S. indicts Assange, once again, it’s a question of extradition, and whether Assange stays in Britain or ends up in Sweden, Mark Ellis of the International Bar Association said eventually, it will ultimately be up to the politicians to decide whether to hand Assange over to the U.S.
“An extradition request from a non-European state, the United States, to either the U.K. or Sweden requires a political element, not just a judicial element,” he said. “In the end, it will be the political actors, the government of the U.K. or Sweden that will make that decision if in fact the courts agree that extradition can take place.”
If other cases are anything to go by, it could be a long time before Julian Assange sees the inside of a U.S. courtroom. American prosecutors have been trying to extradite British computer hacker Gary Mckinnon for the past six years.
Now some British politicians are suggesting the U.S. government should hire Mckinnon instead of prosecuting him, suggesting he might be able to use his computer skills to help prevent further leaks.
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