Criminal Law
Julian Assange - final stage of extradition battle
WikiLeaks founder's legal team goes before 7 judges in the supreme court in London to fight deportation to Sweden to face questioning over sex crime allegations.
Assange is wanted for questioning in Sweden over claims of rape, sexual molestation and unlawful coercion made by two women he met on a visit to Stockholm in August 2010. He denies the claims.
The supreme court's two-day hearing is unlikely to focus on the detail of the allegations against him, but the legal issue of whether the Swedish prosecutor who issued the European arrest warrant in December 2010 can be considered a valid judicial authority. Assange's legal team, which will include Dinah Rose QC, an expert in civil liberties and European Union law, argues that it isn't.
In Britain, as in the United States, only judges can normally approve arrest warrants. In Assange's case, the warrant was issued by Sweden's public prosecutor. Assange's lawyers argue that the Swedish system is unfair because it puts the power to issue arrest warrants in the hands of the same people who are prosecuting him.
Seven judges rather than the usual five will hear the case "given the great public importance of the issues raised", the court said. Their decision is not expected for several weeks.
COMMENTS
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02/03/2012 21:41:44
Oh Pierre, you little iegotbd idiot.Just because you had it hard (no pun intended) in your formative years and had to bend over for the ideals of the nationalist government, you go fishing for a fight over interpretation.Obviously the problem lies not only with the populace of the bench but also with the quality of legislation spewed out by parliament.A true evil, which you might consider addressing is the one of judicial activism.Judges making policy decisions in tearooms, banding together for certain extra judicial causes, which results in incoherent, nonsensical idiocies not so cleverly coloured as judgments.Also, you might want to excrement some or the other quasi-academic substance about the quality of acting judges. I've stumbled over a few blunt pencils in the courts, who seem to know very little about the law, not even to speak of the purpose and function of the temporary office they occupy.Gaunlett is right. Why have you not criticised the refusal by Justice Sachs in the Sidumo case to join Justice Ngcobo and others in determining whether the right in issue was a labour right or an administrative justice right, he urging a “move away from unduly rigid compartmentalisation so as to allow judicial reasoning to embrace fluid concepts of hybridity and permeability”? Do you share my inability to understand language like that, and the concern that it is inexact because the reasoning is not rigorous? The reasoning you say? What reasoning? We don't speak mumbo jumbo , which, when oozing from the bench, dare I say it- leaves us speechless.