Friday, February 05, 2016

It's Terrible How Fugitives Have To Hide From the Law

CNN gives us another entry in my "the UN is worthless" file.
A UN rights working group has found that Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has been arbitrarily detained by being forced to hole up in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London to avoid arrest. Assange, who is wanted in Sweden for alleged sex offenses, has been in the embassy for three and a half years.
Forgive me if I don't see either the "arbitrary" or the "detention." It's not arbitrary since the principle that the UK will respect extradition requests from Sweden is hardly some weird legal anomaly. And it's not detention since Assange can leave whenever he feels like being accountable to normal judicial processes just like everyone else. Admittedly, this does not account for the age old legal norm that accused rapists should be able to walk the earth freely while completely ignoring judicial summons. So it's fortunate we have a UN group to remind us that process is for peasants.

UPDATE: Good analysis from Carl Gardner. This is just a joke.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

For some reason, I can no longer find your articles on Amptoons. Did they take them down?

David Schraub said...

They've been having trouble with their servers -- it's not just my posts.