[ExI] pussy riot case

[Anders Sandberg]

On 19/08/2012 20:25, spike wrote:
> That isn't news, but the legal handling of his case interests me. It 
> is clear enough that the charges against him are trumped up, and they 
> really want him for his actions on transparency.

 From my semi-insiders perspective (since I discussed this extensively 
with my Swedish lawyer boyfriend, which automatically makes me a super 
expert :-) ), transparency is a side issue.

It more and more looks like a perfect storm of a narcissist with a posse 
of professional paranoids meeting a career bureaucrat completely 
untrained in how to handle escalation or explaining the finer point of 
the Swedish system. Essentially prosecutor Ny's career is on the line, 
and she misjudged 1) the publicity, 2) the chaotic international 
aspects. The rest of the Swedish legal community are standing at the 
sidelines and smiling.

The exception is Assange's lawyer who is trying to paint the system as 
horrifically corrupt (which is the job was hired for) and a few people 
who got annoyed enough to take him to task (there has been some 
exchanges in the newspaper debate pages; basically the game is to find 
flaws and argue they are huge or don't matter). The lawyer is winning 
online and abroad, since people don't care for the actual boring fine 
print and practice, just what the rules *seem* to say. He is not 
convincing legal people at home, but that doesn't matter.

As for extradition, that is a howler. In principle the US can ask for 
extradition from Sweden (or from the UK, which is much easier!). They 
would then need to submit information enough to convince a Swedish court 
that 1) there is a case, 2) there is enough information linking Assange 
to criminal acts to warrant an extradition. Now, if you buy the 
conspiracy theories all of this exists and is top secret - but keeping 
that top secret in a Swedish court, even if the relationship to a 
powerful foreign power is at stake, is quite tricky. And the courts can 
be very independent (the foreign department is currently wringing their 
hands over a civil case where a building the Russians consider covered 
by diplomatic immunity is going to get sold for tax debts).

But the real circus would be whether Assange would be accused of a 
capital crime. Sweden (like most EU countries) by principle do not 
extradite people if they can be killed. So the procedure would be that 
the Swedish prosecutor would ask their American counterpart to give a 
written assurance that he would not seek the death penalty. This 
assurance is never given, since writing one is apparently political 
suicide for a US prosecutor. Without it nothing will happen.

There are some theoretical loopholes where the government can get around 
the courts if they *really* badly wanted to send Assange west. But these 
are burning bridges situations in a case like this: there would be nasty 
constitutional hearings and it would turn essentially the entire legal 
community against the government. They are still smarting over the 
handling of one CIA suspect who ended up treated badly (I think he 
finally ended up with asylum and compensation).

All this could have been avoided if certain people had not tended to 
escalate. The proper handling would have involved a sequence of boring 
bureaucratic decisions, likely ending with Assange going along with it 
just to get the darn thing out of his hair.

I think outsiders do not comprehend that the transparency aspect of the 
case is not very important in Sweden. People in general - including 
politicians - are fairly in favor of Wikileaks. However, you do not mess 
with the offended-industrial complex! The fact that he seems to have 
behaved like a cad triggered some of the nastier sides of the legal 
system, where political correctness goes hand in hand with puritanism. 
The charges are not trumped up, it is just that in most countries the 
law would have shrugged: "sorry, ladies, that's life". Here it 
overreacted instead. This is why Ny is so tenacious: it is a matter of 
*principle*... and her continued career.

I'm almost hoping he escapes to Ecuador so we can see the next chapter 
when he has a falling out with El Presidente...

-- 
Anders Sandberg,
Future of Humanity Institute
Philosophy Faculty of Oxford University