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Bergen, Norway
15 February 2011
Marianne Haslev
Skånland:
If Assange is
extradited to Sweden
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is wanted by Sweden. Two
women there have accused him of rape and Swedish
authorities have issued a warrant and want him extradited.
One should not underestimate the possible emotional motives
of revenge, power and triumph especially in cases
concerning sex. I am not only talking of motives on the
part of people who claim to have been raped, but equally of
officials who have a possibility of attacking a world
celebrity and clearly an attractive man. Officers of the
courts are not above emotionally motivated actions and the
justice system of Sweden is without safe-guards against it.
Besides, in people of every nation an extra dose of
adrenalin and triumph tends to be released when one can
pick on someone from another country and thereby assert
one's own country's importance.
Britain has certainly not been free from crazy cases and
flagrant miscarriages of justice against innocent people,
especially in the areas of sex and family affairs, neither
has Assange's Australia and numerous other countries, of
course. A few examples from Britain:
Case at the Court of Human Rights:
P, C and S against the United Kingdom,
admissibility
Judgment, press release: P, C and S
against the United Kingdom
The Rochdale Case of alleged 'satanic
abuse'
(the heading is in Norwegian, but most of the articles are
in English)
Cleared: the story of
Shieldfield
Richard Webster / Guardian, 2002
Cleveland child abuse
scandal
Wikipedia, latest ed 4 February 2011
Article collections:
Welcome to Barnas Rett
The Nordic Committee for Human Rights -
Archives
Nevertheless, in the Nordic countries people are perhaps in
a particularly bad situation in cases of this sort,
especially because freedom of speech has been under attack
for a long time and court cases and verdicts are kept as
secret as it is possible for the authorities to make them.
Secret court cases, censorship in the publication of
verdicts, prohibition against any reporting of how the
cases are really conducted and how individuals are treated
by the authorities, are all standard. Norway and Denmark
are bad, Sweden even worse. The only protection of Assange
will probably be that this case is so well publicised that
Swedish super-moralistic certainty that sex equals rape,
may backfire: if he is extradited and has to stand trial,
the Swedes will be reluctant to run the case in the way
such cases are ordinarily conducted, since it will affect
their image abroad.
An article in The Guardian on 11 February, "Julian
Assange's lawyer makes graphic defence during extradition
hearing", reports:
"-
- remarks this week by the Swedish prime minister, Fredrik
Reinfeldt, in which, Robertson said, he had vilified
Assange as "public enemy number one" in Sweden and created
a "toxic atmosphere" against him. Reinfeldt is reported to
have said that Assange's defence team had patronised Swedes
by criticising its legal system."
I am not a bit surprised, this is exactly what one would
expect and Reinfeldt may very well have been quoted
accurately. Any bit of criticism of the way Sweden has
arranged its society leads to counter-attack from Swedes -
even on an official level, even by the prime minister. One
might ask why they are afraid of criticism - if everything
is as perfect as they claim then surely allegations to the
contrary can easily be shown to be without a basis?
Debates in
Britain about the possible extradition of Assange have
frequently held Sweden up as a reputedly perfect country
where an innocent man would risk nothing and a guilty one
would receive utterly humane treatment. If
one sees the Swedish - and generally the Scandinavian -
justice system in operation in the field of sex or family
cases, one is led to revise any such assumption and
conclude that it is the result of propaganda and naïvety.
Sweden is definitely the most authoritarian of the
Scandinavian countries, in the attitude of people employed
in official functions as well as the general population. A
large majority of Swedes are very subservient to the state
and admire their perfect welfare state unreservedly
whatever happens in documented cases. "Adjustment" to the
will of the state is everything, the individual nothing.
They have not even needed Olof Palme to teach them this bit
of collectivist ideology and are very hesitant about
standing up for any individual's rights. There is a belief
that any criticism is bad manners showing insufficient
"socialisation". There are frequent denials that
miscarriages of justice ever occur in the judicial system
or in the administrative decisions of the bureaucracy of
their society. The opposite is true. I know a few
oppositional lawyers in Sweden and have seen close to the
way their clients have been treated by the bureaucracy and
the courts, the courts in such cases not being in the least
interested in facts or proof. I have myself functioned as
an expert witness in one such Swedish case, in which the
procedure certainly made me feel I was somewhere in the
Soviet Union.
In a case like Assange's, we should not ignore what has
happened to so many innocent people in Scandinavia jailed
on accusations of incest, abuse and the like, frequently on
the strength of an accusation alone and often backed by
psychobabble ideology, which has invaded the political and
judicial systems completely. As prosecutor Clare Montgomery
has stated: "If Sweden says it is rape, then it is rape."
(my translation, from "Assange advokater kritiserar
Reinfeldt"). At the same time, Swedes are surprised,
defensive and hurt that Sweden's legal system is
criticised, and prime minister Reinfeldt, as we heard, is
upset and angry. – Here in Norway, too, a prominent
(female) lawyer has stated that when someone is indicted on
a charge of rape, then he
is guilty.
Swedish retired judge Brita Sundberg-Weitman, who has
testified in the Assange hearing, has for years been
outspoken about very serious defects in the Swedish justice
system. She has also written about it, including the very
illuminating book Rättsstaten
åter! ("Back to the
Rule of Law!"). Her testimony in the Assange case, as
reported in the press, seems a fair, actually moderate,
assessment of the facts. I would in the present
circumstances not put Assange's chances of a fair and
sensibly conducted trial all that high if he is extradited
to Sweden. Further extradition to the USA is not the only
threat here.
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Assange Swedish prosecutor ‘is
anti-men’
Times of Malta, 8 February 2011
Assange's extradition is only the tip of
the iceberg
Guardian, 8
February 2011
Julian Assange's lawyer makes graphic
defence during extradition hearing
Guardian, 11 February 2011
Assange should have been allowed to 'give
his version'
ZDNet, 8 February 2011
Assange advokater kriserar
Reinfeldt
Svenska Dagbladet, 12 February 2011
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