Assange loses extradition appeal

He has not been charged with an offense.

This distinction is mostly left out in the news coverage.

And the arrest warrant was as far as I know was made at the behest of the police and prosecutor without a formal complaint from either of the women. At least the accounts I've seen indicate that the women came to the police jointly to ask for advice on whether or not they could demand and AIDS test of him, and described the situation in such terms that the police decided to get him in for questioning based on their own suspicions despite the fact that another prosecutor had closed the case because she believed there was no indication a crime had been committed.

Based on that he faces a substantial risk of jail without bail possibly for months on end because they have preferred to spend a year and a half on a lengthy legal process instead of taking up past offers of interviewing him about the case in London.

Conspiracy or not, there seems to be more big egos and agendas involved than Assanges, and in those circumstances anyone should be wary about going back voluntarily.

Maybe he is guilty. Maybe he's a horrible person. But guilty or not, if the situation is the way I've seen it described, I'd fight tooth and nail to stay out of Sweden too.

But I still think these "accusations" are fishy to the extreme. There might not be a conspiracy, but that doesn't mean that there might not be two scorned women out for revenge coupled with a lawyer and prosecutor who see a combination of a career move and pursuit of a political agenda.

And that in itself is good reason to stay out if at all possible.

UK judges are known to stand up to the political establishment when parliament doesn't get their ducks in a row and very, very carefully make sure they are consistent with UK constitutional law, which does in fact provide fairly strong protections, and even more so coupled with the Human Rights Act. This to the ongoing exasperation of UK politicians. Swedish judges does not have a similar reputation.

I could very well see a UK judge deciding that extradition would not be compatible with rights guaranteed to him under UK or EU law, regardless of the treaty, due to the state of the US legal system, but I really can't imagine a Swedish judge thinking twice about it...

Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but personally I would not take my chances if Sweden if I didn't really have to if I was in his shoes.

He is wanted for arrest to be questioned on suspicion. He has not been interviewed. It would be absolutely shockingly unprecedented even for Sweden if they intend to charge him based on testimony that one prosecutor didn't even believe indicated a crime had taken place, without a formal complaint (see below), without physical evidence and without having conducted an interview to get his side of the story.

You seem to try to make it out as if this is just a formality and he's "practically charged", just not technically because they need to wait until he'se there first.

If this is just a technicality, then this case stinks to high heaven based on the information that's been disclosed about this case so far.

The problem is, if it isn't just a technicality, and they seriously want to do an interview before making a reasoned decision about whether to charge him, they've had several opportunities to do so a long time ago, and refused, in order to spend a year and a half trying to get him into a Swedish jail.

In either case something is up. Possibly just the career goals of the prosecutor. But this is not how this plays out for less high profile cases in Scandinavia. Not even in Sweden.

> As I understand it both women claim he had sex non-consensually with them

As I understand it, both women described something that the police decided to interpret as non-consensual sex without a formal complaint from either of them - an interpretation one of the prosecutors who reviewed the case thought was nonsense.

> It wasn't,

His behavior has not been proven to be anywhere near the media portrayal of the complaint, nor has the testimony of the women in question been under any kind of serious scrutiny. Maybe it was just like that. Maybe it was worse. Or nothing criminal might have happened.

After all the case only still exists because it was in a pretty much unprecedented manner picked up by a second prosecutor known for her hardline views and desire to significantly tighten up Swedish rape laws well beyond anywhere else in Europe after one prosecutor dismissed it on the belief that there had not been any crime.

At the same time, one of the women tried to remove tweets that described how she'd had a great time with Assange after the alleged rape, and a blog post describing exactly how to use a similar method of going to the police to describe a situation as a legal method of taking revenge on someone.

Assange might very well be guilty, but there are enough bizarre things about this case that if he is innocent, he has every reason to fight this extradition, particularly given his background, out of a concern for the motivations of the prosecution. As such, using his decision to fight extradition as an indicator of what he thinks or doesn't think about what behavior is reasonable or whether or not he is guilty of a crime is flawed.