[BinaryIdiot]

I'm assuming parent is referring to the sexual assault and rape allegations against him. Depending on which side you're on you may believe they're made up charges to get him locked up or you may think he's a criminal hiding from doing said things to multiple women (2 IIRC).

FYI, at the moment the statute of limitations have ended for the sexual assaults and the rape statute ends in 2020.

[happosai]

Assanges version is "The rape charges are fake smokescreen used to extradite me to USA via sweden". Now this fails the Occam'ss razor. If USA cared they would extradite Assange directly from UK, Swedish detour adds nothing of value. Only makes things much more complicated. The relationship between UK and USA spooks have much warmer relation than USA and Sweden, and Sweden would still needs UK's permission to to extradite to USA. Wikileaks is now become all about Assanges inflated ego, where he believes world revolves around him and Hillary is personally targeting drones against him. Meanwhile in real world, if Assange weren't, someone else would be publicizing leaks.

The great irony of it all is that Max penalty Assange faces is 6 years in comfy swedish prison. He chooses instead to lock himself in an embassy for 4 years so far...

[EdHominem]

You need an actual crime to extradite someone. That's why the rape case is so important.

That's the difference between "rendition" (kidnapping) and legal extradition.

There's no plausible crime to use for a UK extradition because Assange didn't hack into the systems himself, and isn't bound by our laws on the release of classified information.

[mythz]

It's hard to believe the Ecuadorian government is complicit with helping a rapist escape justice. Rape allegations also fall neatly into NSA/GCHQ's playbook for character assassinations.

Seems more likely the reasons for taking political asylum in a non-US alliance embassy, is, political.

[cmdkeen]

For crying out loud. He went to the UK Supreme Court arguing that he shouldn't have to face extradition and that the crimes he was accused of weren't crimes in the UK and didn't warrant extradition. The Supreme Court disagreed vehemently and he jumped bail before he could be extradited to Sweden.

[mythz]

Which doesn't prove guilt only that he wanted to avoid extradition. If he is innocent and believes the allegations were manufactured whose purpose was to eventually extradite him to the U.S. (plausible given their convenient timing), he'd have every reason to want to avoid extradition.

Assange has always been opened to being questioning over the allegations (within the Embassy) and the Swedish prosecutors only recently agreed to allow him to be interviewed within the Embassy, which is strangely set to happen today (17 October 2016).

[TazeTSchnitzel]

The “the rape allegations were made up so Sweden can extradite me to the U.S.” line never made sense. The UK is even friendlier with the US than Sweden is, there's no way he couldn't be extradited from the UK.

[cmdkeen]

It is also worth pointing out that the UK has to give permission for onwards extradition from Sweden to the US if a request were to be made. If the ultimate game plan for the US was to engineer his extradition it seems a little odd to not have requested it from the UK alone while he was here, rather than have to throw the Swedish legal system into the mix as well. Both Sweden and the UK are required to not extradite when there is a risk of the death penalty being applied - so that wasn't an issue either.

The whole "but the Swedes won't guarantee not to extradite him" is neatly covered by the whole point the US hasn't requested an extradition, and no legal system can or will get involved with hypothetical situations.

[makomk]

As I understand it, the UK government has to give permission for extradition from Sweden, but extradition from the UK to the US requires the support of both the UK government and the UK courts - and extradition requests from the US are held to a higher standard of evidence than ones from the EU. The UK government is certainly pretty friendly to the US so that's no obstacle, but the UK courts are less predictable.

[cmdkeen]

If he is guilty he also has every reason to avoid extradition - there are plenty of possible motivations. Regardless of what he believes criminal complaints have been made and demonstrated, to the satisfaction of the highest court in the UK, that he has a case to answer in Sweden and that justice is best served by extraditing him. Questioning him in the Embassy does nothing to mean that he would be available to be tried in Sweden, that is a simple enough reason for Sweden to want to question him in Sweden.

To add - the Swedish Supreme Court has also ruled against him last year, and a Swedish court in September ruled against him as well following the UN report. That is an awful lot of court rulings against him...

[imron]

'strangely'. That's some amazing coincidence.

[BinaryIdiot]

Yeah honestly I find it hard to find solid information in either direction. As far as I can tell it's not proven either way (he hasn't stood trial) so even if he did it I can't imagine the Ecuadorian government feeling complicit.

Regardless I don't have a dog in this fight; I find both sides pretty polarizing and difficult to get to the facts.