So Julian is holed up in the Ecuadorean embassy and the police (that’ll be the gov’t then) is thinking of invoking some obscure law so that they can storm the place and drag him out. I’m interested in your view on whether this is a good and fair plan. I throw open for your consideration: Would we be pleased if we were sheltering someone in one of our embassies in a foreign land and the local gov’t decided it was no longer sovereign territory and stormed it? Would anyone care 2 hoots about Assange’s alleged sexual misdemeanours if he wasn’t the founder of Wikileaks and hadn’t pissed off the US and British? We are assured (by Hague and any other gov’t spokespeople) however, that the two things aren’t related. Roman Polanski is wanted in the US for sexual misdemeanours (OK, it was a long time ago). Why isn’t he holed up in an embassy somewhere fighting extradition? Why such a storm about Assange when people like Omar Bakri were here for years plotting Jihad with impunity?
I agree Glid.......did we raid the Libyan Embassy after one of our police women was murdered from within it? No. The only time we raided an Embassy, was in 1980 at the Iranian Embassy in London,, to release hostages that they thought they could hold and still have diplomatic immunity.......The Assange thing is just the UK Govt doffing its cap to Washington......and as for the Swedes saying "of course we wouldnt send him to America"...what a load of tosh.......Apparently the Swedes investigated his alleged crimes in Sweden years ago and threw them out, telling him he was free to go and that there were no charges to answer......until the Wikileaks thing and the Americans wanting his nads on a plate......
I was always under impression embassy is sovereign ground of X country? If they storm they loose all credibility and we might as well ignore the rest of embassy's. Police outside for him not to leave yes it is UK ground but that is as far as it should go. If they manage to sneak him out good on them as man is clearly scapegoat. All charges magically appeared after leaks via WikiLeaks. BTW in 2009 Polanski was arrested in Zürich, then he was extradited to us. No idea if he is in jail as Sarkozy was trying to get USA to let him go.
He wasn't. He was consigned to his luxury Swiss chalet in Gstaad while the legal shenanigans went through (which took a long time) and was then free to go. The Swiss were widely thought to be over-zealous. Fortunately, Polanski bears them no ill-will. Believe me, it was quite a story here.
Wow I was thinking he was sent there and not charged, you live and learn. Rich always have it easier, they even do not go bankrupt like rest. Assuage should be let go as it is clearly political.
We should not enter the embassy but equally we should not let him leave in any 'diplomatic bag'. There is a fine line between leaking information in the public interest and leaking information that the goverment needs to keep secret for any number of reasons, I think Assange has probably overstepped that line. Recently introduced copyright laws in the US have made certain actions by foreign nationals in foreign lands illegal and therefore presumably extraditable. Now that is something to be worried about.
Had the UK Government actually broken in the Ecuador embassy to arrest Assange, I think I would have flipped my lid. I can feel outrage building within me as this story unfolds. There are too many "conveniences" about this story - America's Most Wanted is out of reach but hey, look at that, he is accused of a couple of nasty crimes that will severely tarnish Assange's credibility as a "hero" and maybe even turn public opinion completely against him. That is a feature of practically every US election campaign - find or invent "dirt", paint your opponent as some kind of deviant freak. And of course, PuppyDog Britain will roll over to every misguided demand placed upon it by the US, right? I am not convinced that what Assange did was right, nor do I believe it was necessarily wrong either. I haven't formed that opinion. Who knows the facts? Very few people indeed. If you don't know facts, you look for likely motivations on all sides to consider when trying to form an opinion on these types of issues.
Polanski was a convicted man who jumped bail pending sentencing. He lived in Switzerland (and briefly France) openly, not in any embassy. Assange [I like Lucasz's "Assuage" by the way] has not been convicted or even charged - he was on bail pending extradition to Sweden to be questioned, and that was the bail he jumped. He has been given political asylum by the government of Ecuador and is a refugee in their embassy. So the cases are as different as could be. In my view, if our British authorities violated the Ecuadorean embassy to capture Assange, the consequences would be catastrophic. Every British embassy in the world would become fair game for the local regime to violate when it suited them, and we would have deprived ourselves of legitimate complaint. Plus we would have gratuitously made an enemy of Ecuador, which has behaved decently and blamelessly, and acted like a bully. It would take decades to undo such damage. It is up to William Hague to get his act together and do the right thing.
Some of those reasons presumably being their illegal use of torture, propping up of dicators / sponsoring terrorism, destruction of the environment and miscellaneous human rights abuses at home and abroad?
Indeed. Assange appears to be a very strange man who has often behaved inconsistently. That does not make him a criminal. Allegations of "rape" where it is common ground that sex took place but it is in issue whether there was consent or not - these are one of the easiest and most obvious ways of smearing someone. Even if the man is ultimately acquitted (as they often are, for doubtful evidence) the case will have taken up the man's time, energy, money and reputation, and stopped him from doing other things. If the allegations in this case were plausible and the Swedish investigation genuine, they would have been very keen to interview Assange. Actually, the Swedes have repeatedly turned down offers to interview him. To me, it is this which makes it likely the whole thing is a set up.
It would be very wrong to storm the embasssy, I can understand if there are genuine life threatening circumstances but that is not the case.The diplomtic immunity and all that goes with it is something our governments have no doubt used to their advantage in the past and will again and I wonder how they would be behaving if Assange was in the Russian embassy? The fact that Polanski has been allowed such a degree of freedom over the years doesnt mean that every person in his situation should be treated that way, sucks that it seems to be rich and famous people who usually benefit though. I not so keen on Assange from what little I know of him but if I were in his shoes I`d quite likely do something similar to avoid what seems to be a set up. It would be nice to have a government that tried to do the right thing instead of bending over for the EU/USA or whoever.
The reason that they didn't enter the Libyan Embassy after Yvonne Fletcher was shot was because at the time legally we couldn't. As a direct result of that shooting the Diplomatic & Consular Premises Act 1987 was passed in Parliament and it is under the auspices of that Act that the Foreign Office could make a case to enter. It was used to remove squatters from the Cambodian Embassy building in the late 80's
Minor difference in that the Iranian Government agreed to it and even said Thank You afterwards......
I'm glad that folk seem to think the same as me. You like to think that your country is what it claims to be - openminded, defender of freedom and free speech. You would also want it to choose its friends wisely and for them to subscribe to the same values. When your country has been guilty of colluding in torture, rendition and piling into an unnecessary war and someone calls you on it, you'd hope the government would pipe down and suck it up. Instead of which, it is always looking like an organ-grinder's monkey. It seems to me that the US is increasingly belligerent in every sphere. They are continually giving the Swiss grief for banking practices, but seem cheerful to ignore the criminality perpetuated by their own citizens in Caribbean islands. If anything breeds terrorism, it's this sort of blatant hypocrisy and double standards. But no doubt it's just termed "realpolitik". I think America is a great place and pretty much all the Americans I have met personally have been really nice people. But their government and institutions mainly stink and ours seems to be catching a bit of the whiff of late.
I don't think any of those reasons are legitimate but the idea that government can conduct all of its business in the open is naive.
The most annoying thing for me is the way Americans keep banging on about USA being the "land of the free", the home of liberty and constitutional rights, etc. etc. In reality America is just as much the home of violent repression, unjust laws, institutionalised arrogance, and inequality as anywhere else; comparatively it is Europe which is the land of the free.
