{"id":1973,"date":"2016-02-08T14:17:09","date_gmt":"2016-02-08T12:17:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/?p=1973"},"modified":"2016-02-08T14:34:49","modified_gmt":"2016-02-08T12:34:49","slug":"why-the-assange-ruling-is-not-ridiculous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/2016-02-08\/why-the-assange-ruling-is-not-ridiculous\/","title":{"rendered":"Why the Assange ruling is not ‘ridiculous’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mads Adenaes, until recently the Norwegian chair of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, agrees with my post<\/a> that a Guardian editorial on Friday seriously misrepresented the group’s legal ruling that Assange had been arbitrarily detained.<\/p>\n

Adenaes also explains in simple terms why the ruling is not a “publicity stunt” (the Guardian), “ridiculous” (British foreign secretary Phillip Hammond) or “crazy” (too many people commenting on my social media pages). It is grounded in a very reasonable interpretation of international law \u2013 and very unreasonable legal behaviour by both Sweden and the UK.<\/p>\n

Adanaes’\u00a0comments were made during an interview on Democracy Now. The whole interview can be found here<\/a>. But this\u00a0is the relevant\u00a0section:<\/p>\n\"adenas\"\n

What Adenaes\u00a0points out\u00a0is that the detention is considered arbitrary in part because Sweden has not pursued it in the way a similar\u00a0“normal” case would have been. Sweden, remember, let Assange leave the country after he had been interviewed by the first prosecutor\u00a0and it had been\u00a0decided to drop the case.<\/p>\n

In normal circumstances, it would be entirely routine for the second Swedish prosecutor, who revived the case, to come to the UK to conduct a further interview, as has happened numerous\u00a0times before. In this case, where there are serious\u00a0grounds for\u00a0believing Assange is in danger of political persecution (that secret grand jury awaiting him in the US for the embarrassing revelations\u00a0put out by\u00a0Wikileaks), the failure of Swedish prosecutors to make possible such an interview in the UK over several years is treated as a sign of bad faith. It\u00a0provides\u00a0further grounds for\u00a0suspecting that Assange is in real danger of onwards extradition to the US, assisted by Sweden.<\/p>\n

Note what else Adanaes says of the behaviour of the second prosecutor, Marianne Ny, who revived the case after it had been dropped:<\/p>\n

Swedish courts have been very critical of the prosecutor, of the Swedish prosecutor, for this. And if you read those judgments closely \u2013 they\u2019re in Swedish, of course \u2013 you will see that it is as strong a criticism as you can expect possible from a Swedish court against the way that the prosecutors have proceeded here.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, Swedish\u00a0judges\u00a0think the prosecutor is behaving unreasonably too.<\/p>\n

The UK is actively participating in this legal charade by spending millions of pounds to keep Assange confined to a tiny room in the Ecuadorean embassy, apparently more interested in turning him\u00a0into a reviled figure than in expediting an\u00a0interview by Swedish prosecutors that could resolve the case and get him dedicating his energies\u00a0to\u00a0the important work he\u00a0does\u00a0for Wikileaks.<\/p>\n

That is essentially why the UN panel calls it “arbitrary detention”. Not a “publicity stunt” or “ridiculous”. A very reasonable interpretation of the rights Assange should enjoy to fair treatment under international law. (It should be noted that his continuing detention, after this ruling, amounts to torture.)<\/p>\n

As Assange’s lawyer, notes:<\/p>\n

He\u00a0has been detained now for five years, one month and 29 days. And to put it bluntly, that\u2019s a hell of a long time to detain someone, someone who has never been charged and has never even been questioned by the Swedish authorities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That so many people\u00a0have\u00a0concluded that a panel of leading international law\u00a0experts has\u00a0arrived at a preposterous decision in the Assange case says far more about those reaching such a conclusion than the panel.<\/p>\n

Too many people are apparently willing\u00a0to believe what the British government and the corporate media tell them must be\u00a0true. They do so, it seems, because they mistakenly believe that the corporate media \u2013 one made possible only through\u00a0massive subsidies provided by the advertising of large corporations, or the BBC, a state broadcaster dependent on government funding \u2013 represent them rather than the vested interests of the powerful.<\/p>\n

The universal derision in the British media of a\u00a0UN panel of legal experts, transforming them\u00a0into a bunch of buffoons on a matter of international law, should serve as a springboard to questioning\u00a0what passes in Britain (and the US) for\u00a0news and analysis. Instead it has set many\u00a0marching in lock-step with the British government.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mads Adenaes, until recently the Norwegian chair of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, agrees with my post that a Guardian editorial on Friday seriously misrepresented the group’s legal ruling that Assange had been arbitrarily detained. Adenaes also explains in simple terms why the ruling is not a “publicity stunt” (the Guardian), “ridiculous” (British […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[18,50,6],"class_list":{"0":"post-1973","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-guardian","8":"tag-julian-assange","9":"tag-media-criticism"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1973","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1973"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1973\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1973"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1973"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jonathan-cook.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1973"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}