Julian Assange would cooperate with Swedish authorities if they
reopen a rape case against him but will continue to resist any bid
to extradite him to the United States, his lawyer said Sunday.
“We are absolutely happy to answer those queries if and when
they come up,” Jennifer Robinson told Sky News television about the
rape claims.
“The key issue at the moment is US extradition, which we have
warned about for many years,” she added.
The WikiLeaks founder is in custody in London awaiting
sentencing for breaching his British bail conditions in 2012 by
seeking refuge in Ecuador’s London embassy to avoid extradition to
Sweden.
He was arrested at the embassy on Thursday after Ecuador gave
him up, and is now also fighting a US extradition warrant relating
to the release by WikiLeaks of a huge cache of official
documents.
The Australian has always denied the claims of sexual assault
and rape in Sweden. The first expired in 2015 and the other was
dropped in 2017, but the alleged rape victim has now asked for the
case to be reopened.
If Stockholm makes a formal extradition request, the British
government will have to decide whether to consider it before or
after that of the United States.
Robinson said Assange would seek assurances from Sweden that he
would not be sent on to America, saying: “That is the same
assurance we were seeking in 2010 and the refusal to give that is
why he sought asylum.”
– ‘Not above the law’ –
She added: “He’s not above the law. Julian has never been concerned
about facing British justice or indeed Swedish justice. This case
is and has always been about his concern about being sent to face
American injustice.”
The US indictment charges Assange with “conspiracy” for working
with former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to crack a
password stored on Department of Defence computers in March
2010.
He faces up to five years in jail.
Manning passed hundreds of thousands of classified documents to
WikiLeaks, exposing US military wrongdoing in the Iraq war and
diplomatic secrets about scores of countries around the world.
The conspiracy charge against Assange seems intended to sidestep
limits on prosecution potentially arising from the US
Constitution’s First Amendment guarantee of press freedom.
But Robinson insisted: “This indictment clearly engages
newsgathering activities and the kinds of communications that
journalists have with sources all the time.”
The lawyer condemned as “outrageous” claims made by Ecuador
about Assange’s behaviour in the embassy, including that he smeared
his faeces on the wall, saying: “That’s not true.”
Quito also accused him of failing to care for his cat. WikiLeaks
said Assange had asked his lawyers to “rescue him (the cat) from
embassy threats” in October, adding: “They will be reunited in
freedom.”
Assange’s father, John Shipton, on Sunday urged Australia to
bring his son home.
(AFP)
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