BREXIT - European Arrest Warrant (EAW) Scrapped?

WikiLeaks JOHN PILGER Julian Assange's Indefinite Detention https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmGBNp8X_t4 WikiLeaks: Brexit Scrapping European Arrest Warrant Against Assange ​Europe 11:09 24.06.2016 The United Kingdom's decision to exit the European Union means that the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) against founder and editor-in-chief of the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks Julian Assange should be scrapped, the website said Friday. MOSCOW (Sputnik) — On Thursday, the United Kingdom held a referendum to determine whether or not the country should leave the European Union. According to the final results, 51.9 percent of voters, or 17.4 million people, decided to support Brexit, while about 16.1 million opposed it.     #Brexit means the scrapping of the European Arrest Warrant used as the excuse to detain Assange without charge in the UK for 5.5 years     — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) 24 июня 2016 г. The EAW is a warrant that is valid through all members of the European Union. Assange launched the WikiLeaks website in 2006. Since then, the site has released millions of classified diplomatic documents from around the world on espionage practices, war crimes, torture and many other human rights violations. Assange has been residing at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since 2012 out of fear of being extradited, first to Sweden where he has been accused of sexual assault, and ultimately to the United States where he could face espionage charges for publishing secret documents through his website. http://sputniknews.com/europe/20160624/1041866762/assange-brexit-arrest-warrant.html C  O  M  M  E  N  T Wow, this is exciting. Assange could be free soon! Looks like I'll have to find another US target? Wonder how Viktor Bout's getting along? ;) --- The way this displays in my browser is leaving me feeling like I'm on acid. LOL Everything looks really strange, no matter how I adjust. I'm not sure what I've done to the display, but I'm finding it hard to feel 'at home'. If I lean right back in the chair and look at this from a long distance, the display looks totally different. Wonder if the Blogger programmers have done something to their templates? Everything looks too vertically stretchy (spacey) when published.  I don't like it. ---  Just viewed the codes again.  It's not me.  It's Blogger.  It keeps throwing up autocodes I don't want.  Apart from the annoyance factor of having to edit out the crap codes to get the display I want, it's a relief.  Thought I'd been hacked or something.  LOL Tried to find a remedy, but I'm not sure what this Blogger auto code insertion thingy is called. Not sure if it's the HTML options.  As in, maybe it should be set to 'Show HTML literally' versus 'Interpret typed HTML'.  I don't know the difference.  The explanations don't help.  This is really annoying. [CLICK IMAGE TO ENLARGE]

Telesurtv Interview - Assange - The Lastest

Telesurtv Interview FULL ARTICLE @ SOURCE http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/An-Obvious-and-Conspicuous-Injustice-says-Assange-on-Asylum-20150314-0002.html An 'Obvious and Conspicuous' Injustice, says Assange on Asylum Published 14 March 2015 (15 hours 31 minutes ago) In an exclusive interview with teleSUR, Julian Assange talks ... [ ... EDIT ... ] CS: On the topic of your asylum, tell me about the larger context of the U.S. investigation into WikiLeaks?    JA: Well I had already had a number of run-ins and legal cases with big banks and the U.S. government before. Our publications beginning 2010 set off a major conflict with the U.S. government. As a result, the U.S. started up what it calls a whole government investigation, involving more than a dozen different U.S. agencies that is believed to be the largest ever investigation into a publisher. As the investigation has gone by, the competition between the different agencies over who is leading it has clarified. Now leading it is the Department of Justice National Security Division, the Department of Justice Criminal Division and the FBI as the sort of boots on the ground. [DoJ Nat Sec + Crim Div & FBI] A lot of information has come out over time about the U.S. formally admitting court filings in February, just over a week ago, that is a multi-subject, ongoing, long-term, investigation and other findings saying that WikiLeaks is the central target of that investigation, not Chelsea Manning, who has already been dealt with. This is not an investigation that is simply confined to the United States. The different agencies involved include the National Security Agency, the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). The CIA and DIA, that is publicly admitted. The NSA, that is in the Snowden documents and also other records that came out from the Pentagon. According to Snowden records I was placed on an NSA manhunt list in 2010. But we know that the U.S. military intelligence was spying on me from 2009 onwards in Germany. The FBI has conducted its activities in Europe, in Iceland and Denmark; the U.S. military intelligence in Germany; and the FBI also in the UK; and U.S. and-or Swedish intelligence in Sweden. As time has gone by we have gone from a position of defense in these cases to offense. Which I have been able to do really to the thanks of the asylum of the embassy, since it is a static situation now [inside the Ecuadorean embassy] we can plan a bit more. We have filed criminal cases now against the U.S. intelligence activities in Germany where U.S. military intelligence came off their bases in Wiesbaden and went down to Berlin to spy on me and one of my friends, Jeremy Zimmerman, who runs a freedom of the press outfit in Paris. The criminal case in Denmark last year, in relation to the unlawful FBI actions against us in Europe. The FBI sent a secret private jet over to Iceland where they had recruited an informant for the U.S. embassy in Iceland. The Icelandic government found out about it, that they did it without authority, and told [the U.S.] to get out. They [the U.S.], then smuggled the informant around a number of different hotels around Iceland interrogating him. Eventually they were kicked out of the country by the interior minister. They then took that informant, who was being paid, to Washington DC, and interrogated him for another five days and engaged in various plans to try and get that informant to steal hard drives from England, and engaged in cash transfers and other interrogations with him — he did at least two — so that is the subject of another criminal complaint in Demark in relation to the FBI in Denmark, and the illicit cash payments that occurred to that informant. So that is most aspects of the criminal case in the United States. Something important came out early this year in relation to Google. The U.S. government subpoenas all information that Google had — email, search terms, etc. — from three of our journalists: Sarah Harrison, Kristinn Hrafnsson and Joseph Farrell. These subpoenas were important. Not only did they place Google under gag orders, but the subpoenas revealed a sort of legal attack that the U.S. government is making on media and on WikiLeaks. So their defense is that they are investigating — which add up to 45 years in prison — espionage, conspiracy to commit espionage, computer hacking, general conspiracy, theft of U.S. government information. [*An attack on ALL media, not just WikiLeaks.] These charges are very interesting because they are sort of like crossing the spectrum of different charge types. They are trying many, many different ways to attack the organization and me using conspiracy on the one hand but also non-espionage charges that make it easier to extradite people, and you can see a little bit like that, that just happened in a case in Canada where they extradited someone for a non-conspiracy related charge successfully even though he claimed asylum in relation to his espionage investigation.  [Matt de Hart  [Link 1] & [Link 2]] The two conspiracy charges are detail. But lets put this back into the global context about what is going on. WikiLeaks does not publish in the United States. WikiLeaks is not registered in the United States. WikiLeaks is a publisher in a variety of jurisdictions: Iceland, France, at one time Sweden. So how is it that the United States is claiming jurisdiction to prosecute us for these offenses. What the U.S. is claiming is that any information about the United States gives it jurisdiction and if we publish information that came from the U.S. government, therefore it has jurisdiction to prosecute publishers that exist outside the United States, because of their connection. Now, the way journalists and publishers work is that some journalists get something from a source and then communicate it to other journalists in the organization; the editors and subeditors, the publisher, the distributor, the tech guys, and so on. What the U.S. government is saying is that this flow of information, that occurred within WikiLeaks as a media organization, is a conspiracy. So they have worked out a way to embroil an entire media organization in the U.S. jurisdiction based on any information coming in through one journalist working for that media organization. So it is a territorial grab by the United States to say that they can go after any media organization anywhere in the world that publishes information that they say is classified; not even classified actually… That they say has been derived from someone in the United States — a government worker doing something that they should not have — that is enough. If they allege one crime in the United States, some government worker that cannot handle classified information properly, or something else, and that circulates to others in a media organization that use that to go after the whole media organization. So it is really quite a serious threat to global media scrutiny of U.S. wars and U.S. spying. CS: So in this larger context, what does the Swedish investigation represent?    JA: The U.S. investigation was already on foot. Without wanting to go into the details of the Swedish investigation, which are well documented on justice4assange.com, the Swedes started their investigation and then dropped it, and then started it again, and then in the context of us just about to publish Cabelgate, put out an Interpol red notice for this preliminary investigation with no charges and kept it going ever since. The women in the case say to the courts that they did not want any such investigation. But the government took this up anyway. So it is quite a strange case and is being used as a PR stick and it has trapped me here in the UK. So whenever we talk about what is going on in the U.S. case and how serious that is, the PR attack says “oh no, no, no. That is about some Swedish sex case.” That has been a tremendous distraction. Formally the Swedes say that it is a quote “preliminary investigation” un-quote. I have not been charged and there has been nothing done in that preliminary investigation for four years and the Swedish authorities admit it. Now it seems likely that the preliminary investigation will dissipate within the next year. But the UK has said that even if that happens they are going to arrest me anyway and you also have the U.S. case. CS: Is there anything you want to say or add about your 1000 days of asylum generally?    JA: It has been a difficult 1000 days. Not so much for me but for my family. For me, I have plenty of things to concentrate on that are not in the embassy. I have an organization to run. We have a dozen different court actions across the world. As time has gone by the legal and political situation has clarified, such that it has become an obvious and conspicuous injustice. That view is now the dominant view in Sweden, the United Kingdom and many other countries always had that view but these two countries are involved in a concrete way. The United States is a bit harder. Although there has been very hostile rhetoric in the United States — calling for my assassination, calling for WikiLeaks to be listed as a terrorist organization, calling for bills presented before congress to define me and all my staff as enemy combatants who can be killed and kidnapped at will — the U.S. is a large enough country that we do have a fair run in a number of U.S. media outlets; some of the small ones nearly all the time. But even the largest, even Fox News, occasionally. So we have a spectrum of support in the United States not always able to express itself, but sometimes it is and I think that is quite a hopeful sign when you consider the amount of demonization that has occurred from the national security state in the U.S. Here in the United Kingdom, as a result of my case, they changed the law last year to say that there should be no more extradition without charge. That only deals with one charge because we still have the U.S. case to deal with. But there is a growing realization that what is happening here is really unjust. You cannot have someone detained in Europe without charge for four-and-a half years. Everyone can see that there is something wrong with that. [UK change in law re extradition without charge would (I think) no longer apply, as Conservatives have pushed through adoption of EAW legislation that becomes effective by default (or something like that); and that legislation, as I understand, takes precedence over domestic laws.  Anyway, that's how I understood what was going on.  But maybe this needs another look-up.] Julian Assange is founder and editor-and-chief of WikiLeaks.  FULL ARTICLE @ SOURCE http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/An-Obvious-and-Conspicuous-Injustice-says-Assange-on-Asylum-20150314-0002.html EUROPEAN ARREST WARRANT Jacob Rees-Mogg on May's European Arrest Warrant claims JACOB REES-MOGG says:  after 1st of December, how EAW is implemented will not be decided by Britain; it will be decided by Court of Justice of the European Union.  So who can arrest British citizens will be ceded to Brussels.  COMMENT So that's a round-up of what's going on. Operation Get-Assange / WikiLeaks in summary: Beginning 2010 WikiLeaks publishing:  set off a major conflict with USG. USG whole govt investigation. More than a dozen different US Largest ever investigation into a publisher. Leading the investigation - Department of Justice: > National Security Division > Criminal Division > FBI boots on the ground. Multi-subject, ongoing, long-term, investigation WikiLeaks central target Not confined to the United States. Agencies involved incl. > National Security Agency (NSA) > CIA > Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA) -  *CIA + DIA is publicly admitted (Snowden docs & Pentagon records) Activities: > NSA manhunt list in 2010 - Assange > US military intelligence spying on Assange - from 2009 onwards, Germany > FBI conducted its activities in Europe:  Iceland + Denmark + UK > US and/or Swedish intelligence conducted its activities in Sweden This investigation doesn't just affect WikiLeaks; it affects all journalists and publishers and, apparently, the US is aiming for worldwide jurisdiction (which is ridiculous ... unless you're an Evil Empire.)

Sweden - Selective Human Rights Concerns: Gregorian Bivolaru / EAW Julian Assange

20 Oct 13 Live discussion with vice-president Viviane Reding on the Romanian misuse of EU mechanisms to continue persecution of refugees VIDEO:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rnb_PbUpYY#t=14 On 14th October Mrs. Reding visited the Citizens’ Dialogue in Stockholm. The Swedish representative of Soteria International, Mr. Konrad Swenninger brought up the issue of a human rights contradiction between the European Arrest Warrant and the International Convention for protection of Refugees. As an example, Mr. Swenninger mentioned the case of Gregorian Bivolaru, a Romanian political dissident continuously targeted by Romanian authorities and was given political asylum in Sweden. The asylum is now threatened by a European Arrest Warrant issued in June 2013 by Romanian authorities, as a result of a highly controversial decision of the Romanian Supreme Court against Bivolaru. Acknowledging the case, Mrs. Reding stated that indeed the European Arrest Warrant has been a complicated subject in European politics. She and her team have insisted on precise procedures related to the warrant, so that it cannot be used by national authorities to pursue undemocratic interests. Referring to the situation in Romania, Mrs. Reding is concerned that indeed the country struggles with implementation and respect for democratic procedures. Mrs. Reding reminded the audience that in the summer of 2012, the Directorate General for Justice of the EC, which she conducts, severely criticized the attack on the constitution of Romania attempted by opposing Romanian governing parties. In a follow-up briefing Mrs. Viviane Reding, Mrs. Brigitta Ohlsson, Swedish Minister for EU Affairs and MEP Olle Ludvigsson who co-chaired the meeting with citizens expressed their concern and interest to follow the case and received a communiqué from Gregorian Bivolaru concerning his situation. In meetings 17th October in Brussels several Swedish MEPs expressed their concern and interest to work for the case, and the Romanian misuse of the European Arrest Warrant to pursue political persecution of the refugee Bivolaru. We remind that earlier in October the case has been discussed at the Human Dimension Implementation meeting organized by OSCE in Warsaw, both in the plenary discussion on the protection of refugees and in the side-event conference organized by Soteria International. Representatives of the Swedish government assured Soteria International and the international community that Sweden takes its international obligations on Human Rights very seriously and reminded that Swedish legislation, as well as European law, foresee that national courts should take consideration of human rights implications in their rulings. The statement of Swedish governmental representatives and the strong position of Viviane Reding in matters of defending human rights and democratic procedures bring confidence that human rights will be efficiently protected and countries such as Romania, still on their way to democracy, will be given a strong good example and will be prevented in their attempts to disregard or violate the rights of its citizens. http://www.soteriainternational.org/live-discussion-with-vice-president-viviane-reding-on-the-romanian-misuse-of-eu-mechanisms-to-continue-persecution-of-refugees COMMENT The misuse of the European Arrest Warrant ("EAW") is not confined to issue of EAWs on trivial grounds.  The EAW is also misused for political persecution of dissidents or those who otherwise fall foul of authorities. Significantly, misuse of the EAW is not confined to dissidents of 'repressive Eastern European' regimes.   The dubious EAW has been used by Sweden and Britain to facilitate persecution of journalist-publisher Julian Assange, by blocking political asylum granted to Assange by Ecuardor.  So we have witnessed Sweden issuing a EAW and Interpol Red Notice in order to merely question Assange in respect of 'allegations' the Swedish prosecution claims it is 'investigating'. Sweden has been able to issue such an arrest warrant because (a) it is a member of the European Union and (b) the requirement for proof that there is in fact a case to answer has not been written into legislation by Union lawmakers.  How easy is that? While Sweden was quick to issue an EAW and Red Notice, it has been unusually resistant in getting around to even questioning Assange during the 2 years he remained under house arrest in Britain, in addition to a further 2.5 years that Assange has remained trapped at the Ecuador embassy, under threat of British arrest and extradition to Sweden (almost certainly leading to subsequent extradition from Sweden to the United States). The treatment of Assange is in stark contrast to Sweden's selectively liberal stance protecting Gregorian Bivolaru. Gregorian Bivolaru's 2005 arrest would have been effected under an Interpol all-points-bulletin apprehension, as Romania's accession to the European Union was in 2007. Despite allegations of a sexual nature involving a minor (which were later dropped on claim of 'coercion') and a whole host of other serious charges, Sweden refused to extradite Gregorian Bivolaru and proceeded to grant Bivolaru asylum in 2005. A 2013 EAW now threatens Gregorian Bivolaru's asylum in Sweden and Swedish politicians are commendably quick to express their concern regarding Bivolaru's matter, but remain curiously silent regarding WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who has now been denied liberty (without charge) for over 4 years. EAWs are a dime-a-dozen and generally used for pursuit of trivial matters, as the British surge in figures and analysis attests.  Unfortunately, the EAW also does away with arrest initiating-authorities being required to prove subjects of an EAW actually have a case to answer. The EAW sidestepping of the burden of proof is a travesty of justice that should never have been permitted (let alone recently adopted by the British, by default, thanks to the British Conservatives pushing through legislation by sleight of hand). Uproar in Commons over vote U-turn on European Arrest Warrant Cameron narrowly avoids rebellion after European Arrest Warrant vote scrapped The arrest warrant allows any European Union country to request the arrest and extradition of a wanted person without proving they have a case to answer – the traditional burden of proof that British courts insisted foreign countries pass before agreeing an extradition. Critics say the burden of proof now is too low, and can lead to people being arrested simply on the word of foreign police or magistrates, without any case to answer. EXTRACT - http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/uk/uproar-in-commons-over-vote-u-turn-on-european-arrest-warrant-1.1995697 Sweden's treatment of American target, Julian Assange, captive without charge on what strongly smells of trumped up allegations that serve US political objectives, is blatantly incongruous and jarring. Where Sweden's conscience should be, concerning the detention and political persecution of publisher Julian Assange, lies a gaping, unmentionable hole that goes unchallenged. ................................................................... Something Stinks: British Detention & FBI Investigation Australia Kowtows to America LINK