WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is set to be questioned by a Swedish lawyer in his London asylum. This means the grounds for the existing warrant against him will no longer apply, but he still won’t be safe from arrest.

The email affair that dogged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in the recent US election played a large part in the triumph of her Republican opponent Donald Trump. The scandal can be traced to a six-storey apartment building in the exclusive London district of Knightsbridge, the raised ground floor of which houses the Ecuadorian embassy.

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, has spent the past four years here in asylum. For months the disclosure website put pressure on Hillary Clinton by feeding a constant flow of information into the public domain. In mid-October the Ecuadorian embassy cut its guest’s access to the Internet, presumably at the United States’ request.

However, WikiLeaks does not consist of Julian Assange alone. The revelations continued. On the day of the election, Julian Assange declared that neither he nor WikiLeaks had any interest in influencing the result in any way, especially as both Trump and Clinton were extremely hostile to whistleblowers. But he said WikiLeaks’ job was to publish material if it was authentic and of news value. This, he said, was undoubtedly the case with the documents from the Clinton camp. The 45-year-old Australian claimed that WikiLeaks would have loved to have published documents about Trump and his team as well, had they been sent any.

Six-year investigation

Right now, though, Julian Assange’s agenda is dominated by something else entirely. On Monday, Stockholm’s chief prosecutor, Ingrid Isgren, accompanied by a Swedish police officer, will walk down Basil Street, past the solidarity vigil being organized by Assange’s supporters and into the Ecuadorian embassy. There she will question Julian Assange about the rape accusation that has dogged him for the past six years, despite the fact that no charges have been brought.

This interrogation, a step forward after years of standoff, is part of an investigation that began in 2010. The case was in fact closed by a state prosecutor in Stockholm in August 2010, on the grounds that it was not possible to establish that a crime had been committed. However, Marianne Ny, a state prosecutor from Göteborg, took the case up again.

What needs to be understood is that Swedish law governing sexual offenses is unusually broad. The woman whose statements form the basis of the preliminary investigation at no time felt threatened by Assange: There was never any talk of violence. It was enough for her to say that on a night in which they had already had sex, he penetrated her again while she was half-asleep – without using a condom. When the woman visited a Stockholm police station in August 2010, she was seeking information on how she could make Assange take an AIDS test.

Fears of extradition to the US

The European arrest warrant under which Assange was detained in England, more than 2,160 days ago, is intended only to make it possible for representatives of the Swedish justice system to question him. Once he has been questioned, the grounds for this arrest warrant would automatically cease to apply.

Source: http://www.dw.com/en/assange-legal-drama-enters-new-phase/a-36378413