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Extradition 3

Backtracking a little from the UK’s Extradition Act (in the Extradition 1 post) it is necessary to understand that the origin of that legislation comes from the European Arrest Warrant (“EAW”) regime in turn based on the Council Framework Decision of 13 June 2002 on the European arrest warrant and the surrender procedures between Member States.(Pdf)

It is also necessary to understand that where interpreting legislation like the UK’s Extradition Act (that will be applied in Assange's hearing) and if finding ambiguity or uncertainty, resort can be made--ordinarily to parliamentry second reading speeches in countries like Australia for example
—to examining, in this case, that very document of the Council Framework Decision.

The Preamble to the Council Framework Decision states in part:

According to a Los Angeles Times article on Dec 22, the CIA launched the new task force to study the WikiLeaks revelations, called WTF or the WikiLeaks Task Force. This comes at a time when rumors have begun recirculating in some circles speculating that WikiLeaks is a CIA front or at least an unwitting tool of US interests.

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Since the rise of WikiLeaks to global prominence a number of like-minded sites around the world styled after WikiLeaks have emerged. The imminent arrival of one organization called OpenLeaks is the only one thus far to be designed and operated by former high profile WikiLeaks dissenters, the most notable being former German spokesperson Daniel Domscheit-Berg. A CNN Dec 12 article headline read, "WikiLeaks rival plans Monday launch after internal split, founders say".

I’ve had a tough day today, taking in the full implications of Glenn Greenwald’s post (see also Heather Brooke’s piece) on the detention conditions of Bradley Manning.

Now that Julian Assange is free on bail, it is perhaps time to lighten up a little.

2084
A SHORT SATIRICAL STORY

Marty Hari was overwhelmed and it was 3rd March 2084. The man from http://www.dikkileaks.org/exposure had leaked the data from http://www.PublicControl.com/usa, exposing a horrible secret two days previously. All top US officials and politicians had exempted themselves from obeying CyberTrojan law. US authorities, highly embarrassed, were baying for his blood while he was sanitising the Swedish data in his London apartment and watching holographic TV around his computer.

Lieutnant Scheisserkopf at Pentagon Newspeak was organising parades of military solidarity and giving daily briefings on the threats to US national security posed by Dikkileaks, saying:

Marty Hari is an enemy of the state and Attorney General Holdup is examining the provisions of CyberTrojan-22.

CyberTrojan-22 states that agents enforcing CyberTrojan-22 need not prove that CyberTrojan-22 actually contains whatever provision the accused violator is accused of violating.

Marty found something else not to his liking, at all.

To avoid thinking of his worst nightmare come true, he reflected on world history from the early 21st century. Global warming, food shortages, water wars: a biblical pestilence of disease and floods, fires and famines. Governments had to take drastic action to curb population growth. It all came from an original idea of a president's wife, later a Secretary of State, lastly President who in her last will and testament gave her flash drive to Congress with all her accumulated ideas and proposals.

A confession is commonly understood as a statement—either spontaneous or pursued by someone else’s interrogations—made to others about what only the speaker knows. For the Spanish thinker María Zambrano, though, a confession implies also something transcendental, easier to understand from her catholic background: a strict action of auto-analysis and self-criticism based on the idea of being each of us, eventually, mistaken. The confession is made de facto in front of an authority—a priest, a policeman, the public opinion—but, on top of that, it is made in front of oneself and to oneself. “Every time Philosophy re-writes its own history, it forgets with disdain what men owe to other kinds of knowledge that are born either close to it or far away from it”, says Zambrano.

It's taken a while before some detailed information has come to light on the arguments presented by prosecutor and defence at the bail hearing yesterday.

The Telegraph reports:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/wikileaks/8202524/WikiLeaks-Ju...

Earlier, during the two hour long hearing, the court was told that the “strength” of the evidence was poor.

His legal team argued that particularly the rape allegation was wrong and if the case was tried in Britain the case would not be classified as such a crime.

This refers or alludes to, apparently, the rape allegation being in the nature of a relatively minor sexual molestation in which case it seems to me, it then doesn't fit within the 12 month European Arrest Warrant system requirement of an offence where the maximum sentence must be 12 months or more for extradition to be valid. If in the UK such an alleged rape evidence was prima facie (on the face of it) low category molestation, per UK law, attracting less than 12 months custodial sentence, then it would not appear to qualify as an extraditable offence.

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If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all.

          - Noam Chomsky

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As reported by the BBC, The Sydney Morning Herald  and The

INTERLUDE-BAIL APPLICATION 14/12/2010

The principles of bail in both English and Australian law are close. Without looking at bail legislation in the UK (no time sorry) these are most of the factors in NSW Australia that a court will consider in a bail application, with comments as to how they apply, or not,

Firstly there are the presumptions for bail, which have a set of legislated determinants which I won't go into but are an indicator of how a court will ordinarily look on a bail application from the outset. Defence makes submissions on presumptions, prosecutor might have a different view but most often agree on presumption.

OFFENCE: Circumstances of the offence, Strength of prosecution case, Likely penalty on conviction.

Only the strength of the prosecution case is really relevant here and while this is a factor for bail it is not a factor ordinarily for the extradition proper. (Will post on that later, an EU human rights "backdoor" might allow some of it through, per the UK Extradition Act.)

This is the first of a series looking into the extradition process by which Sweden is seeking to have Julian Assange extradited from the UK.

While I'm not a European lawyer, our Aussie system has a lot in common with the UK, which is logical since our legal heritage came from the UK.

Here's my take on a preliminary examination of legislation and it's application to the Swedish extradition application.

Firstly, there is the European Arrest Warrant system (EAW) by which signatory parties have a common warrant form in all the different languages which for the purposes of extracting relevant information (and not going through tortuous online translations from Swedish), I shall cite the UK version, but keep in mind it's the UK form designed for UK prosecutors to extradite from other category 1 territories.

That form template is here:

http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/d_to_g/extradition/annex_b/

Scrolling down we find the following:

Statement

I just had to watch Fox News talking about how Wikileaks was promoting anarchy. It’s not my fault, I was looking for ghouls. Anyway, when I went back to twitter everyone I follow had linked the first video below. We had been talking a lot about how the behaviour of the MIC in the last year will radicalize a generation that has been widely regarded as being completely self absorbed, spoiled, etc., etc., all the things old people usually call young people who haven’t done anything yet. But look at this.

IGNORANCE OF THE LAW IS NO EXCUSE, BUT…

A fundamental maxim of western criminal justice systems is that a citizen cannot say “I am excused because I didn’t know the law”.

And that is an interesting concept which has a counter maxim which I’ll get to, in the context of a false analogy which has arisen on the web related to the Swedish prosecution of Julian Assange, which needs addressing:

http://bigthink.com/ideas/25314

"There seems to be a double standard in terms who counts as a “good victim.” Suppose your investment adviser isn’t paying out returns as promised. You don’t want to press charges, you just want your money. So, you go to the prosecutor’s office, the prosecutor hears you out, and she says, “You got mixed up in a Ponzi scheme. That’s fraud. Do you want to press charges?”

Up to this point, you just wanted help to get what’s yours, but now an expert has re-framed your experience in legal terms. Is anyone going to argue that you weren’t really defrauded because you didn’t realize you were a victim until someone explained your rights?"

That is a horrible analogy to time delays in making a complaint of sexual assault.

When Julian Assange was arrested beginning of this week, all newspapers were all over the story. Suddenly Norwegian and Swedish media erupted in yet another frenzy regarding Assange and Wikileaks. Unfortunately that excitement seems to have died of a bit. It actually seems that it has become completely forgotten by the media at this point. I have visited some of the biggest newspapers online in Norway and Sweden and I can't find any stories regarding Assange or Wikileaks -- unless I check their weekly archive.

Once in a while You find really dense information sources, concentrating a whole lot in just a small amount of space or time. This is one of those cases.

Normally in this space I would hold forth my lofty opinions or offer news and analysis, but this calls for an exception...

We are now approaching the state of Orwell’s dictum that he “who controls the present controls the past.” He who controls internet servers controls the intellectual record of mankind, and by controlling that controls our perceptions of who we are, and by controlling that controls what laws and regulations that we make in society. - Julian Assange, 2010

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Now that most of the mainstream media have finally figured out who Anonymous is and that WikiLeaks is not “one lone hacker”, some seem to think it is an organization populated by 16 year old boys shouting “Pew! Pew! Pewpewpew!” at their computer screens. And by “WikiLeaks” they mean this whole movement we are watching.

We are at the point now where any petition in support of WikiLeaks looks like a Who’s Who of intelligent thoughtful professionals the world over, while people of all ages around the world are engaged in any way they can. As the battle lines are being drawn, look around at who is standing where. It is a very interesting and telling thing to observe.

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An Argument of the Heart.

I feel outclassed. I feel unbelievably inarticulate.
The information war is raging, and I am speechless.
The warring tribes have set their lines,
the corporations have told their lies.

I've starred in horror and disgust,
as Sen. Lieberman, defiles his elected office.
I've whispered praise of wiki-leaks and Assange,
and have thought hard as to what I would sacrifice.
For personal safety, I couldn't care less,
but to those connected, at this I wince.

It is a telling tale, in which one should shudder,