Swedish court upholds Assange arrest warrant
STOCKHOLM:
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange faced another setback in his legal stand-off with Sweden yesterday after an appeals court rejected his request to lift an arrest warrant for him over a 2010 rape accusation. The Stockholm appeals court upheld a district court’s ruling to maintain the European arrest warrant, and also rejected Assange’s request to hold a hearing over the matter. Assange “is still detained in absentia”, the court said, adding that it “shares the assessment of the district court that Julian Assange is still suspected on probable cause of rape... and that there is a risk that he will evade legal proceedings or a penalty.” Assange’s lawyer Per Samuelson told AFP he would appeal against the ruling. The 45-yearold Australian has been holed up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London since June 2012, seeking refuge there after exhausting all his legal options in Britain against extradition to Sweden. Assange has refused to travel to Stockholm for questioning over the rape allegation, which he denies, due to concerns Sweden will extradite him to the United States over WikiLeaks’ release of 500,000 secret military files on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
This is the eighth time the European arrest warrant has been tested in a Swedish court. All of the rulings have gone against Assange. The appeals court said Assange’s four-year embassy sequestration “is not a deprivation of liberty and shall not be given any importance in its own right in the assessment of proportionality”. Assange’s lawyers had urged Sweden to follow the non-binding ruling of a UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, which said his confinement in the embassy amounted to arbitrary detention by Sweden and Britain. The appeals court noted that the length of his embassy stay and “the earlier passivity” of police investigators were “arguments for setting aside the detention”. “However, the relatively serious offence of which he is suspected means that there is a strong public interest (in) the investigation being able to continue.” “At present, continued detention therefore appears to be both effective and necessary so as to be able to move the investigation forward. — AFP