Supreme Court chief calls sex charges against Julian Assange “a mess” and praises him for leaking secret US documents.<\/i><\/p>\n
A senior Swedish judge has said that the sex-crime allegations against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are “a mess”, and praised him for leaking classified US documents.<\/p>\n
Speaking on Wednesday [3 Apr 2013] at the University of Adelaide in Australia,\u00a0Stefan Lindskog, chairman of the Supreme Court of Sweden, also\u00a0listed legal obstacles to extraditing the 41-year-old Australian to the United States to face\u00a0prosecution for exposing thousands of classified documents.<\/p>\n
Lindskog was critical of the Swedish criminal investigation, and\u00a0suggested that Sweden’s extradition treaty with the United States\u00a0would not apply to Assange.<\/p>\n
“I think it is a mess,” said Lindskog, referring to the Swedish criminal investigation.\u00a0“Basically, I think there are some misunderstandings, especially when it\u00a0comes to the issue of extradition.”<\/p>\n
“Extradition shall not be granted when alleged crimes [are] military or\u00a0political in nature,” Lindskog said.<\/p>\n
Assange has taken asylum in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London since last\u00a0June to avoid extradition to Sweden on sex crime allegations.<\/p>\n
Criminal allegations<\/strong><\/p>\n Assange is wanted in Sweden for questioning over criminal allegations made by\u00a0two women.<\/p>\n However, he says the allegations are a ploy to get him to\u00a0Sweden from where he would be extradited to the US.<\/p>\n The US Department of Justice has been investigating WikiLeaks since the\u00a0website began distributing hundreds of thousands of classified\u00a0US documents.<\/p>\n Few details of that investigation have been made public.<\/p>\n Assange has refused to comment on whether he had any dealings with Bradley Manning, a US soldier who admitted to leaking classified documents and video clips to WikiLeaks, but called him a political prisoner.<\/p>\n Lindskog praised Assange’s campaign of publishing the classified information through WikiLeaks.<\/p>\n “He’ll be thought of as a person who made public some pieces of\u00a0classified information to the benefit of mankind,”\u00a0he said.<\/p>\n “It should never be a crime to make known [a] crime of a state,” he\u00a0added.<\/p>\n