Sunday 2 September 2012

A stitch-up and a miscarriage of justice

[What follows is an excerpt from the transcript of an interview about the Julian Assange situation with former British ambassador and Dundee University Rector Craig Murray broadcast on 31 August on the Straight Talk programme of Occupy News Network:]

The chances of getting to Ecuador from the embassy in the middle of London without the agreement of the British authorities are limited. You can, you know, we can all think of sort of physical escape scenarios, but they’re not easy. There’s going to have to be a diplomatic solution. My guess would be that it will take a long while in coming, I think six months from now. There’s not going to be much public awareness that anything has changed, although talks will have been going on behind the scenes.

The obvious solution is for the Swedes to agree that they won’t extradite him to the United States, but the Swedes absolutely refuse to do that, and the United States refuses to say that it won’t apply for extradition, because frankly there’s no doubt whatsoever that the United States has convened a grand jury to look at prosecuting Assange and Wikileaks and has every intention of extraditing him to the United States. So all of that is very, very difficult.

You can see a kind of Lockerbie solution. The alleged Lockerbie bomber, Mr. Megrahi, was tried in the Hague under Scottish law by Scottish judges because they didn’t want to send him to Scotland and they agreed to hold the trial on mutual [RB: presumably “neutral” is what was said] premises, and the Dutch agreed that a court in the Hague [RB: actually Zeist] could actually be in effect under Scottish law for the period of the trial. It’s not the happiest precedent, because I think the trial was itself a stitch-up and a miscarriage of justice, but it does set a precedent for somebody being tried by another state on somebody else’s territory, so there is a precedent in international law if people were looking for that.


[Quotation of Craig Murray must not be taken to imply agreement on my part with his views on the Assange case.]

3 comments:

  1. See comment later on that thread where you are accused of being an asset of South African intelligence.

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  2. I am well aware of Patrick Haseldine's campaign against me on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere. He is both deluded and malicious. His ravings were the reason why I had reluctantly to institute moderation of comments on this blog. Ignoring him is the only rational response to Mr Haseldine.

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  3. Outraging Latin America by threating to storm the Ecuadorian embassy to capture an anti-war whistle-blower is hardly astute diplomacy, but yet another public display of Britain’s subservience to USA.

    A subservience that explains the failure to hold a public enquiry into Lockerbie!

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