[rad-green] UN special rapporteur exposes Swedish sexual misconduct frame-up of Assange

*http://www.defenddemocracy.press/un-special-rapporteur-exposes-swedish-sexual-misconduct-frame-up-of-assange/
<http://www.defenddemocracy.press/un-special-rapporteur-exposes-swedish-sexual-misconduct-frame-up-of-assange/>*

*Defend Democracy Press          18 November 2019*

[image: image.png]
*UN special rapporteur exposes Swedish sexual misconduct frame-up of
Assange*

*By Oscar Grenfell*

An official letter to the Swedish government by United Nations Special
Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer provides a thorough exposure of the
nine-year campaign by the Swedish judiciary and the state to smear
WikiLeaks’ publisher Julian Assange as a sex offender and to deprive him of
fundamental legal and democratic rights.

The letter, sent on September 12, was publicly released last week. Melzer
had first written to the Swedish government, along with the governments of
the US, Britain and Ecuador, in late May. That correspondence followed
Melzer’s meeting with Assange in Britain’s Belmarsh Prison, and his
conclusion that the WikiLeaks founder was being subjected to “psychological
torture” as a result of ongoing state persecution and “public mobbing.”

The Swedish authorities replied to Melzer on July 12 and summarily rejected
his finding that the years-long preliminary investigation into allegations
of sexual misconduct against Assange had been marked by judicial
arbitrariness, along with flagrant violations of his rights to anonymity
and due process. The Swedish government sought to shield itself behind
invocations of the independence of the judiciary, despite Melzer’s
documentation of blatant political interference in the case.

Melzer’s September 12 reply is a meticulous documentary exposure of those
evasions and of the entire frame-up that has been perpetrated against
Assange. It should be examined in full
<https://spcommreports.ohchr.org/TMResultsBase/DownLoadPublicCommunicationFile?gId=24838>
by
all defenders of democratic rights, and by anyone who wishes to know the
truth about the Swedish “investigation.”

In his conclusion, Melzer noted the crucial role played by the Swedish
pursuit of Assange in the entire US-led vendetta against the WikiLeaks
founder since 2010.

He wrote: “The medical, factual and circumstantial evidence at my disposal
shows that the manner in which Sweden conducted its preliminary
investigation against Mr. Assange, including the unrestrained and
unqualified dissemination and perpetuation of the ‘rape suspect’ narrative,
was the primary factor that triggered, enabled and encouraged the
subsequent campaign of sustained and concerted public mobbing and judicial
persecution against Mr. Assange in various countries, the cumulative
effects of which can only described as psychological torture.”

Despite never charging him with a crime, Sweden’s investigation provided
the pseudo-judicial pretext for embroiling Assange in the legal system.
Britain’s support for Sweden’s unprecedented request that Assange be
extradited merely to “answer questions” forced him to seek political asylum
in Ecuador’s London embassy in June 2012.

The Swedish investigation provided the bogus rationale for Britain’s siege
of the embassy and its threats that it would arrest Assange if he set foot
outside the building.
Read also:
Chelsea Manning faces $441,000 in fines and another year in jail for
refusing to testify against WikiLeaks
<http://www.defenddemocracy.press/chelsea-manning-faces-441000-in-fines-and-another-year-in-jail-for-refusing-to-testify-against-wikileaks/>

More broadly, the Swedish allegations served to malign Assange, and to hide
the real reasons that he was being persecuted. They were used to enlist an
entire layer of upper middle-class feminists, pseudo-leftists and
self-styled civil liberties advocates in a campaign to demonise and abandon
any defence of Assange. This was under conditions in which the American
state apparatus was working to silence WikiLeaks due to its publication of
leaked documents exposing US war crimes, mass surveillance operations and
global diplomatic intrigues, affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of
people.

This campaign of “public mobbing” was essential to creating the political
climate in which the Ecuadorian government could violate Assange’s asylum
and hand him over to the British police. It fostered the political
environment in which the US administration of President Donald Trump could
unveil 18 charges against Assange, explicitly over his legal publishing
activities.

In section three of the document, Melzer made a point-by-point
substantiation of his assessment that the entire Swedish investigation was
marked by arbitrariness and a violation of fundamental legal norms. Those
points are listed below, along with examples of some the evidence cited by
Melzer:

● *Disregard for confidentiality and precaution*: Within hours of the two
female complainants approaching police solely to request that Assange be
compelled to take an STI test, Swedish prosecutors had ordered his arrest
on suspicion of rape and leaked the news to *Expressen*, the country’s
largest newspaper. Assange’s own statement, on August 30, 2010, was
likewise provided to the media, in violation of Swedish law. An
investigation into the breaches was apparently dropped.

● *Disregard for exculpatory evidence*: The Swedish authorities ignored the
assessment of the first prosecutor to review the case, who stated, “I do
not think there is reason to suspect that he has committed rape” and that
the “conduct alleged” by SW, one of the complainants, “disclosed no crime
at all.” Text messages from SW to a friend, stating that she had never
intended to file a complaint for a criminal offense and that “it was the
police who made up the charges,” were similarly disregarded.

● *Proactive manipulation of evidence*: The day after the initial
prosecutor dropped the investigation against Assange, “police officer IK,
who had formally questioned SW on 20 August 2010, modified and replaced the
content of SW’s original statement in the police database, upon instruction
of her superior officer MG and without consulting SW.”

● *Disregard for conflicts of interest: *This included the fact that the
investigating police officer, IK, who interviewed SW and modified her
statement, was a friend of AA, the other complainant, and had expressed
hostility to Assange on Facebook. Claes Borgström, the lawyer who sought to
have the investigation revived after it had been dropped, had operated an
attorney’s office with the former minister of justice, who had colluded
with illegal US rendition operations inside Sweden.

● *Disregard for the requirements of necessity and proportionality*: This
included the unprecedented decision of prosecutors to issue a European
Arrest Warrant and Interpol “red notice” for Assange, merely on the grounds
that they wished to question him. Moreover, prosecutors refused, over the
course of almost five years, to question Assange via video link or in
London, as is done regularly in other cases.

● *Disregard for the right to information and adequate defence*: Even after
they ordered his detention in absentia, prosecutors refused to provide
Assange’s lawyers with precise details of the allegations against him.

● *Disregard for the right of appeal to the European Court of Human Rights*:
After the British Supreme Court dismissed Assange’s challenge to
extradition to Sweden, Swedish prosecutors allegedly requested that his
window of opportunity to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights be
reduced to “zero hours.”

● *Disregard for the Mutual Legal Assistance agreement*: Melzer again
pointed to the refusal of Swedish prosecutors to interview Assange, noting
that this “raises serious doubts as to the good faith motivation of the
Swedish prosecution.”

● *Complacency or complicity with third-party interference*: Melzer cited
secret correspondence between the British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS)
and the Swedish prosecutors. Most damningly, this revealed that when, in
2013, Swedish prosecutors were considering dropping the investigation into
Assange, British officials demanded that it continue. Emails between
Swedish prosecutors and the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) about
the case had purportedly been lost, and no-one could remember their
contents.

● *Refusal to guarantee non-refoulement*: Melzer noted that the authority’s
refusal to guarantee that they would not dispatch Assange to the US if he
was extradited to Sweden was in violation of “widespread international
practice,” the “peremptory prohibition of refoulement towards the risk of
torture and ill-treatment” and Assange’s “credible fear of extrajudicial
onward extradition by Sweden to the United States, particularly given
Sweden’s history of arbitrarily handing over persons to CIA custody and
subsequent torture.”
Melzer noted that on April 10 he received a letter from the British
authorities refusing to discuss the prospect of Assange’s extradition to
the US because “it would not be appropriate for officials to speculate on
hypothetical scenarios.” The following day, Assange was arrested by the
British police, and it was immediately revealed that the US government was
seeking his extradition.
The UN official noted that the Swedish authorities had no doubt similarly
been apprised of US plans to seek Assange’s extradition over the course of
the years that they were pursuing him. Melzer wrote: “Information made
available to me concerning the case of Mr. Assange suggest that preliminary
exchanges between Sweden and the United States regarding a potential
extradition request would already have taken place, thus rendering the
envisaged scenario anything but hypothetical.”

● *Pervasive procedural procrastination*: Melzer noted that “between 2010
and 2019, the preliminary investigation conducted against Mr. Assange in
Sweden has been opened by one prosecutor, closed by another, re-opened and
then closed again by a third, only to be re-opened by a fourth, without any
decisive procedural progress being achieved for almost a decade.”
Prosecutors have still not charged Assange. The statute of limitations on
one of the women’s complaints has already expired, and the other will
expire next year.

In the latter sections of his letter, Melzer pointed to Sweden’s open
rejection of international rulings, including by United Nations bodies,
that Assange had suffered years of arbitrary detention, and that his legal
rights had been violated.

In a damning conclusion, Melzer wrote: “There is compelling evidence that
Swedish officials have actively and knowingly contributed to the
psychological torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or
punishment inflicted on Mr. Assange, whether through direct perpetration,
or through complicity or participation, any of which is sufficient to
trigger Sweden’s international obligation to investigate, prosecute, and
provide redress and rehabilitation…” He demanded that those responsible for
Assange’s persecution be investigated and brought to justice.

The document, from an internationally-recognised expert on torture and a UN
official, constitutes an irrefutable indictment of the illegal character of
the US-led pursuit of Assange.

It underscores the fact that in their persecution of the WikiLeaks’
founder, the states involved, including Sweden, have not only trampled upon
the legal and democratic rights of Assange but of all citizens, setting a
precedent for further frame-ups and state persecution.

Published at https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/18/assa-n18.html

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