On November 20, 2014, a Swedish appellate court denied Julian Assange’s application to quash the lower court’s four-year-old order for his detention for questioning about allegations of sexual misconduct with two women in Sweden in 2010.[1]
Assange had argued that the order could not be enforced because he has been and still is in Ecuador’s embassy in London, U.K. under a grant of diplomatic asylum and that the order was restricting his civil rights.
The Swedish court, however, was not persuaded. It said, “In making this assessment, account must be taken of the fact that Julian Assange is suspected of crimes of a relatively serious nature.” Moreover, “there is a great risk that he will flee and thereby evade legal proceedings if the detention order is set aside. In the view of the court of appeal, these circumstances mean that the reasons for detention still outweigh the intrusion or other detriment entailed by the detention order.” In short, the court could not “set aside the detention solely because Julian Assange is in an embassy and the detention order cannot be enforced at present for that reason.”
On the other hand, the court noted that Sweden’s investigation into Assange had come to a halt and that the prosecutors’ failure to examine alternative avenues of investigation “is not in line with their obligation – in the interests of everyone concerned – to move the preliminary investigation forward.”
An alternative avenue of investigation previously had been proposed by Assange: interview him at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Last month in the House of Commons the U.K. Foreign Minister, Hugo Swire, said, “These are matters for the [Swedish] prosecutor to decide on, but if she wished to travel here to question Mr Assange in the embassy in London, we would do absolutely everything to facilitate that. Indeed, we would actively welcome it.”
Assange’s attorney said the decision would be appealed to Sweden’s Supreme Court. A more likely outcome, in this blogger’s opinion, would be the Swedish prosecutor’s interrogating Assange at the Embassy in London and then determining whether criminal charges would be brought against him.
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[1] This post is based upon Crouch, Julian Assange: Swedish court rejects appeal to lift arrest warrant, Guardian (Nov. 20. 20, 2014); Dickson, Swedish appeal court upholds Assange detention order, Reuters (Nov. 20, 2014); Cowell, Swedish Court Rejects Appeal by Julian Assange, N. Y. Times (Nov. 20, 2014), ; This blog has a number of posts about Assange’s grant of diplomatic asylum by Ecuador and the legal skirmishes over whether, when and where he would be interrogated by the Swedish prosecutor.