Swedish court rejects Assange plea against arrest warrant

London: Sweden’s highest court refused on Thursday to grant permission for Julian Assange, the founder of the WikiLeaks whistle-blowing organization, to appeal a court order seeking his arrest to face questioning over alleged sex crimes, his lawyer and said.

In a telephone interview, Mark Stephens, Assange’s British lawyer, said the ruling by the High Court in Stockholm exhausted his client’s legal options to overturn the court order in Sweden, where the offenses are alleged to have taken place. Thursday’s ruling in Stockholm came a day after Interpol, the global police body, said it had been circulating a so-called red notice seeking Assange’s arrest for almost two weeks. Reuters quoted Kerstin Norman, a Swedish High Court official, as saying the ruling meant that earlier calls for Assange’s arrest were still in force.
In a statement issued from its headquarters in the French city of Lyon, Interpol said on Wednesday that it had issued its call on Nov. 20, two days after Swedish prosecutors won court approval for a warrant that Interpol could circulate, and that it had only now received Sweden’s authorization to make its action public.
Also on Wednesday, Wiki-Leaks accused Amazon.com of ending an agreement to host its Web site. Amazon hosts the sites of many companies and organizations as part of its Amazon Web Services program.
The whereabouts of Assange, 39, is unknown, but the sequence of recent events suggests that if he had wanted to flee Britain, his last known location, without being arrested, he might have had to do so within 48 hours of the November 18 Swedish court ruling.
A report in the British newspaper, The Independent, on Thursday suggested that Scotland Yard’s Serious Organized Crime Agency knows the whereabouts of Assange, said to be in the south of England, outside London, and even has a telephone number for him. But they have declined to arrest him until they clarify technical difficulties with paperwork filed by the Swedish prosecutors.
Stephens, Assange’s lawyer, said his client’s extradition may not be imminent. “Given the procedural defects we’ve seen so far,” he said, “I’d be absolutely astonished if the Swedes were able to present a warrant valid in this country.”
The developments came as several newspapers, including The New York Times, published confidential documents obtained by WikiLeaks and made available from a mass of some 250,000 diplomatic cables from the State Department, including communications concerning American policy toward Iran, Pakistan, North Korea and many other countries.
In a message posted on Twitter, WikiLeaks said its servers at Amazon had been “ousted,” adding that its money would now be spent “to employ people in Europe.” An hour and a half later, Wiki-Leaks continued the attack, saying, “If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the first amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books.”
WikiLeaks then posted a link to its donations page, with an appeal to “Keep Wiki-Leaks strong.”
Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment about any business relationship with WikiLeaks. Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, an independent of Connecticut, said Amazon had stopped hosting the WikiLeaks site on Wednesday after being contacted by the staff of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Staff members had asked Amazon to explain its business relationship with Wiki-Leaks, which Senator Lieberman, the panel’s chairman, had criticized for publishing sensitive government documents.