[justsaysmthng]

Suppose that you're accused of a crime in North Korea and somehow you manage to escape the country.

Will you still respect what you said in the comment and return to NK to stand trial ?

Replace North Korea with Iran, Iraq, Syria or any other country known to be a corrupt or totalitarian state...

Aka at least half of all the countries in the world...

As a foreigner, you wouldn't trust the justice system in those countries and you would be right to try to avoid the trial.

So you see, the validity of what you said depends a lot on the context.

Even if the Swedish investigation and the trial is totally fair, it is not really the issue.

The issue is the extradition treaty with the US - Sweden will have to make a choice - Assange or good relations with the U.S.

And this is were the deadlock is. Go to Sweden and get unfairly convicted (low probability) or get extradited to the US and get life in prison (high probability). Or both.

[DasIch]

Sweden is not North Korea and countries don't extradite to the US all the time because the US justice system is atrocious by first world standards.

Should a Swedish court rule against extraditing Assange to the US, that will have exactly no impact on the relationship between the US and Sweden. No government can reasonably expect from another to break its own laws and it is certainly not in US interest for Sweden to go down that route. Not to mention that the US also reserves the right not to extradite to Sweden in individual cases.

[justsaysmthng]

> No government can reasonably expect from another to break its own laws and it is certainly not in US interest for Sweden to go down that route.

I feel and respect your desire for and belief in integrity on the part of the system, but it's extremely naive to believe that.

Maybe it's the fact that I've lived in many different cultures (including Sweden for a year btw!) or maybe it's my age, but what I've taken away from life so far is this:

There's the story which all people (should) believe and then there's the shit that happens.

We're being lied to since we're born - santa claus, tooth fairy, God, then justice, patriotism, news, terrorism, traitors and so on.

Wikileaks is one of the tools which shows us a glimpse of the shit that really happens.

Corruption, under-the-table deals, intimidations - including members of foreign governments, illegal detentions of foreign citizens, surveillance..

Always treat 'the System' with healthy skepticism - and that is because the information that it broadcasts is often false - due to incompetence on the part of the 'reporters' (usually) or due to hidden agendas that so many groups have.

The world is a combination of many chess games played at the same time - in some you're a pawn, in some you're a rook, in some you're the board ;).