Julian Assange Loses Final Appeal of His Swedish Arrest Warrant
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is still a wanted man in Sweden. The Swedish Supreme Court has denied Assange’s appeal to lift a 2010 arrest warrant in connection to the sexual assault charges against him.
Assange, who has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since 2012, refused to return to Sweden for questioning over allegations that he coerced two women into unprotected sex when he was there for 10 days in 2010. He claims the allegations were a made-up “honeytrap” to force him back to Sweden, where he could be extradited to the U.S. and tried on charges related to WikiLeaks’ dump of classified military documents.
No charges have been filed against Assange in the U.S., and the U.S. hasn’t requested that the U.K. extradite him. Chelsea Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who furnished those documents to Wikileaks, was convicted in 2013 under the Espionage Act and sentenced to 35 years in prison.
Swedish prosecutors have also arranged to question Assange in the U.K., which led the Supreme Court to conclude that there was no reason to drop the warrant—doing so wouldn’t give Assange any incentive to return to Sweden.
Metropolitan Police remain stationed outside the embassy to arrest Assange for jumping bail in 2012, while U.K. authorities were still deciding whether to enforce the Swedish detention order against him.
“We are of course disappointed and critical of the Supreme Court’s way of handling the case,” Assange’s lawyer, Per Samuelson, told Reuters.
“This decision has been taken without letting us close our argument.”
