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Swedish Prosecutors Drop Sexual Assault Investigations Against Julian Assange

posted by janrinok on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the just-another-5-years dept.

c0lo writes:

ABC (Australia) reports

Swedish prosecutors said they had dropped investigations into allegations of sexual assault made in 2010 against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange because they had run out of time to bring charges.

"Now that the statute of limitations has expired on certain offences, I am obliged to drop part of the investigation," prosecutor Marianne Ny said.

But prosecutors said they would continue with investigations over a further allegation of rape against Assange, also made in 2010.
...
They have a further five years to bring any charges over an allegation of rape.

In other news, Sweden and Ecuador have agreed to hold talks aimed at paving the way for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to be questioned over allegations of sexual assault, with 9news reporting that

Assange has challenged Swedish prosecutors to come to his refuge at the Ecuadorian embassy in London to take his statement on sex attack claims.
...
The 44-year-old Australian, who has been living at the embassy for more than three years, said in a statement on Thursday that he was an innocent man and hadn't been charged.

"Come to the embassy to take my statement or promise not to send me to the United States," he said, saying the actions of Swedish prosecutors were "beyond incompetence".

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:31PM

    by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:31PM (#222524) Journal

    None from Sweden needed as long as million$ of bobbies are standing outside the embassy, waiting to arrest him for breaking bail conditions.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by zocalo on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:40PM

    by zocalo (302) on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:40PM (#222533)
    On the subject of the "million$ of bobbies" UK.gov was actually complaining about how much it was costing the UK taxpayer to police the Ecuadorean embassy as part of their response to this change in status. Yes, he's clearly a flight risk and breached the terms of his UK bail, but the only people responsible for that bill are UK.gov. No one is forcing them to keep those police standing outside the embassy 24/7, regardless of what obligations they have towards the Swedish government they could simply rely on regular border controls and if that fails (which is likely, given how many people suspected of being prospective IS recruits seem to be able to make it to Syria/Iraq), then that would be just too bad.
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    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:48PM

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:48PM (#222540) Journal

      I see you've adopted the "UK.gov" moniker ;)

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      • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Thursday August 13 2015, @10:21PM

        by zocalo (302) on Thursday August 13 2015, @10:21PM (#222558)
        It's not a bad shorthand form in places where people are going to recognise the ISO 3166 codes and TLDs, so why not? "UK.gov" might be the most commonly seen one (thanks mostly to The Register), but there's no reason why you couldn't have "US.gov", "CN.mil", etc. as well; might not work to well for Canada/California though unless there was a defacto standard.

        There's also lots of potential for geek humour, of course.
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        • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:51PM

          by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:51PM (#222589)

          Yeah, they screwed up with those 2-letter country codes. It would have been better if they were all three letters instead; much less ambiguity that way, for only one extra character. Then you're have "usa", "can", "mex", "deu" (Germany), "bel", "fra", "ita", "rus", "irq", etc. I'm not sure what UK would be under that scheme though, maybe "uki"? (for United Kingdom and Northern Ireland)

          • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @12:06AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @12:06AM (#222596)

            ISO 3166-1 define 3 unique identifiers: alpha-2, alpha-3 and numeric. The United Kingdom is GB, GBR, and 826, respectively.

            • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Friday August 14 2015, @06:40AM

              by zocalo (302) on Friday August 14 2015, @06:40AM (#222712)
              True, the UK/GB is a bit of an anomaly since there are various groupings depending on which parts of the UK are being referred to; individual countries, Great Britain or The United Kingdom of Great Britain & Northern Ireland. When referring to the central Government in London however, GB.gov would be incorrect since central government *does* cover the entirety of the UK - devolution and hopes of separatist parties preferences not withstanding, hence the use of the unofficial ccTLD "version" of ISO-3166. Another likely variant would be the European Union since "EU" is not included as a grouping in ISO-3166 either, yet EU.gov and the .EU ccTLD are both all too real.
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        • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday August 14 2015, @08:53AM

          by TheRaven (270) on Friday August 14 2015, @08:53AM (#222740) Journal
          The UK government's domain is gov.uk. A uk.gov domain would be the part of the US government that is responsible for the UK. There's also a good administrative reason for having it this way around: everything under the .uk domain is under the control of a UK-based registrar. The delegation of {cc}.* to the correct registrars would be painful and would lead to situations where the registrar for the TLD could exert undue influence over the country code portion.
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          • (Score: 2) by zocalo on Friday August 14 2015, @10:36AM

            by zocalo (302) on Friday August 14 2015, @10:36AM (#222770)
            The usage has nothing to do with internet domain delegation other than using the same ISO defined list of country codes. It's merely a shorthand for a given country's government, military or whatever: "UK.gov" = "The UK's government", "UK.biz" = "UK based companies", and so on - the TLD part doesn't necessarily even have to exist in DNS for that matter, just be clear the context. If used consistently, as is generally the case on The Register, it's also potentially useful for searching and sematic tagging, kind of how stories on Slashdot are often tagged with the applicable state/country codes to aid searching.
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          • (Score: 3, Informative) by MrNemesis on Friday August 14 2015, @01:51PM

            by MrNemesis (1582) on Friday August 14 2015, @01:51PM (#222817)

            The .uk versus the .gb ISO 3166 debate is an interesting quirk and a side-effect of the fact that the Joint Academic NETwork [wikipedia.org] pre-dates the domain name system and most of the internet. JANET mail addresses [soylentnews.org] were basically backwards as we understand them today - username@uk.ac.someuniversity so when DNS and the internet came along it essentially became a backwards compatibility/interop hack to reverse the direction. Hence the use of .uk instead of .gb (especially since Ukraine didn't really have much say in the discussion at the time). Incidentally as well as being responsible for the .ac.uk domains Janet also manages .gov.uk.

            Source: buying one of the salty old CS bods a pint in the student union.

            --
            "To paraphrase Nietzsche, I have looked into the abyss and been sick in it."

    • (Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Friday August 14 2015, @05:46PM

      by purple_cobra (1435) on Friday August 14 2015, @05:46PM (#222917)

      I agree. I would much prefer my tax money spent on something more worthwhile, perhaps glitter on every dog turd in every street in the UK.
      Or to put it another way, stop wasting my money on this shit. If Sweden (and by extension the USA) insist on continuing with this stupidity, the UK should be billing them for it.

  • (Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:53PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Thursday August 13 2015, @09:53PM (#222547) Journal
    Isn't it ironic? [bbc.com]

    The UK is to make a formal protest to the government of Ecuador over the country's decision to "harbour" Julian Assange, the Foreign Office has said.

    ...

    "Ecuador must recognise that its decision to harbour Mr Assange more than three years ago has prevented the proper course of justice... It is completely unacceptable that the British taxpayer has had to foot the bill for this abuse of diplomatic relations," said Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:27PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:27PM (#222576)

    Can you be specific?
    The story I heard was the exact opposite. [google.com]
    ...and I have never heard anything about his having to post bail.

    -- gewg_

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:39PM

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Thursday August 13 2015, @11:39PM (#222580) Journal

      http://www.theguardian.com/media/2012/oct/08/julian-assange-supporters-ordered-forfeit-bail [theguardian.com]

      Julian Assange's supporters have been ordered to forfeit £93,500 in bail money after the WikiLeaks founder sought political asylum in the Ecuadorean embassy in London.

      A court ruled on Monday that the payments must be made within a month by nine friends and backers who in 2010 pledged £140,000 to guarantee Assange would abide by bail conditions during a failed legal challenge to extradition proceedings brought by authorities in Sweden, where he faces allegations of rape and sexual assault.

      Assange broke his bail conditions in June this year when he took refuge in the Ecuadorean embassy in Knightsbridge after he lost a supreme court challenge to the validity of the European arrest warrant that demanded his return to Sweden for questioning. He was due to be sent to Sweden within days when he took up residence in the diplomatic mission, where he was granted political asylum.

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      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @02:46AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @02:46AM (#222646)

        No one has the balls to charge him with a crime, yet somehow there is bail involved.

        The Swedish gov't ALREADY questioned him and told him he could leave the country.
        ...then, all of a sudden, his initial interrogators are called massively incompetent.

        The gov't who made the screwup COULD go to where he is and do another interview--but they won't.

        This is clearly not about a criminal offense.
        This is evil political bullshit with the USA behind it.
        Every official involved in this deserves a slow, ugly, painful death.

        -- gewg_

        • (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Friday August 14 2015, @08:56AM

          by TheRaven (270) on Friday August 14 2015, @08:56AM (#222743) Journal
          Right, because it sets a really great precedent for officers of the court to not follow the procedure that's enacted in law when it's inconvenient. If expediency is the main goal, they should have just shot Assange when they had him in custody. After all, the whole presenting evidence and trial thing is inconvenient and, by your logic, there's a good case for skipping it when it seems like it might be expensive or inconvenient.
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          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @10:06AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @10:06AM (#222762)

            They told him he could leave.
            He left.
            By what twisted logic is he required to return?
            Let me remind you again that HE HAS NOT BEEN CHARGED WITH A CRIME.

            As stated, the correct tack would be to have the party that reversed its position making the effort required in pursuing this further.

            -- gewg_

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @09:20AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14 2015, @09:20AM (#222752)

    None from Sweden needed as long as million$ of bobbies

    Maybe it's cheaper with boobies? Not those, you dirty you, these! [wikipedia.org]