Assange back in Australia

About time. Not that I have that I really have that much sympathy with Julian Assange. Basically he has always seemed like a bit of a narcissistic dickhead to me. But I get really pissed off with the level of US over-reach with their laws.

This all started with a very dubious rape prosecution and red-notice from Sweden. That felt like it was prompted from elsewhere to me – probably the US – trying to pin down Assange about press freedom issues. This was back in 2010! It morphed into what was obviously a pre-planned US extradition in the UK.

US law to anyone who bothers to look at it closely looks like it was invented in the rear end of a extremely stupid mule – one with an flatulent eating disorder. It seldom seems to make any sense in any shape or form, it just splatters indiscriminately. When you look at US laws and procedures from its usage of grand juries, to the elected judges and prosecutors, what you see is a legal system that queerly distorted by questions of legal corruption. That is before you start looking at its weird sentencing and imprisonment policies. Or its wide and varied agencies for enforcement of its laws, most of which appears to be in place purely to allow different enforcement and prosecution bodies to spend excessive time competing with each other.

The main lesson that I have taken from this whole from Swedish / UK / US debacle is simple

New Zealand should completely revisit its extradition treaties with the US. Quite simply extradition requests and arrests over a number of decades across a number of nations and targets from the US seem to have little to do with law, and more to do internal US politics in being seen to prosecute. This fits with the whole political nature of law in the US, and has nothing much to do with how we operate our legal system here. Personally I’m getting worried about the obnoxious behaviour of the US political legal manoeuvres corrupting our own legal process.

If nothing else, the way that the US has prosecuted its extradition requests here and in the UK has massively delayed both justice and resolution because it was so damn clear that it was political. Of course US-philes like John Key and his armed offenders raid on DotCom, or the legal screwups of the previous “war of terror” legislation of Phil Goff.

That is before looking at the US outright kidnapping of foreign citizens, apparently most of whom were innocent of any crime, without any effective judicial oversight and extraction to black sites and military prisons. Amongst other sites, Guantanamo Bay detention camp after 22 years has a long history of torture and abuse of prisoners. 30 prisoners are still held there, mostly because the Federal government doesn’t dare let them have access to civilian legal services and courts.

The legal battles over extraditions have, in my view, been largely about US laws that bear little to no relationship to the laws that the targets are actually subject to. This was certainly the case with Julian Assange, an Australian citizen who was acting as a journalist collecting information that was freely offered for release by a whistle-blower. Quite how the US had any right to prosecute appears to have completely and only relied on their assertion that they had that right.

Because the US has so clearly violated the intent of extradition treaties over many decades. I think that we need change our extradition laws to specifically force the US to prove its extradition claims are valid under NZ laws, not US laws, before any extradition can be made.

From a NZ perspective, many of the US laws are simply legally incomprehensible because the US political system never seems to be capable of reviewing or explicitly discard the more stupid or out of date legislation. Most of the ‘political’ US extraditions seem to use the weirdest laws like the US extradition charges against Kim DotCom of “criminal copyright infringement, money laundering, racketeering and wire fraud.”, of which only money laundering has an close NZ equivalent. Fraud is just obtaining by deception or causing loss by deception regardless how it is done and doesn’t have nearly the same draconian weight of up to 20 years imprisonment.

Furthermore, the US needs to have firm time limits and processes imposed upon it with regards to presenting evidence. It should not be able to present any evidence that it did not have when it made the extradition request.

The farce of getting a armed offenders warrant to drop in by helicopters after getting compliant cooperation from weak minded politicians, apparently only for the purpose of gathering evidence for the US extradition claims should never ever be repeated. The most effective way is to simply make it inadmissible for the extradition hearing.

Similarly extradition requests from any nation should be made to conform to short timetables. If the country making the request isn’t ready to face up in a NZ court nearly immediately (in legal timescales) for a definitive heading, then they should not have their request accepted. There should be no particular reason to have innumerable status hearings.