Glenn Greenwald · @ggreenwald
24th Aug 2012 from Twitlonger
@Klamberg If you write about this - and I sincerely hope you do, in the Guardian or elsewhere - here are a few issues which it'd be helpful for you to address:
(1) The minute you say that it is the Swedish government and not the courts that makes the final decision to extradite - which you said in your post and then here again today - then it means you are negating @DavidAllenGreen's core claim, no matter how much you agree with him on every other issue.
Are you the same Mark Klamberg who wrote this?
"Even if the supreme court has found that there are no obstacles, *******the government can refuse extradition******."
And this?
"In other words, even if the prosecutor-general and the supreme court finds that all conditions for extradition are fulfilled *******the government may veto such extradition******."
You did write, did you not?
If so, is that accurate? Do you stand by it? If you do, then it necesssarily means that what @DavidAllenGreen wrote is false -- namely: "any final word on an extradition would (quite properly) be with an independent Swedish court, and not the government giving the purported 'guarantee'."
What you wrote is the exact opposite of what he wrote.
(2) Whether you believe that Sweden cannot make any decision until there's an extradition request is totally irrelevant to the issue I wrote about: namely, whether it's the courts, rather than the government, that make the final decision.
Contrary to your claim that I omitted your views on that other issue, I did, in fact, note that you were hostile in general to the pro-Assange case and that, in particular, you agreed with Green on *that issue: of whether Sweden must wait to act for an actual request to arrive. Claiming that I omitted your views on that is false.
But even if I had omitted your views on that question, who cares? It's a totally independent issue. It's possible that Green is right on *that question, while still being factually wrong on the issue set forth in (1).
(3) What you're now arguing -- that the Swedish government does theoretically have that this power but can't exercise it -- is both an absurdity and a retroactive concotion.
It's an absurity because it would mean that Swedish law explicitly vests the Swedish government with a power it can't exercise. Is that what you're now claiming?
It's a retroactive concoction because you said nothing in your post about Sweden not being able to exercise this power. You said the opposite. Remember this?
"Even if the supreme court has found that there are no obstacles, *****the government can refuse extradition******."
And this?
"In other words, even if the prosecutor-general and the supreme court finds that all conditions for extradition are fulfilled the government may veto such extradition."
The fact that the argument you wrote negates a crucial part of the anti-Assange case doesn't entitle you to pretend you never made it.
(4) As I said, the only reason I knew of you or what you wrote is because Law Professor Kevin Jon Heller of the Melbourne Law School -- who identified himself as your friend -- emailed me and pointed to your post as proof that it's wrong to claim, as Green did, that the Swedish government lacks the power to refuse extradition. Here's what Professor Heller wrote to me:
____
"Just one note: it is incorrect to say that the final decision to extradite Assange from Sweden to the US would be made by the courts.
"As my friend Mark Klamberg -- a professor of international law at the University of Stockholm -- points out in this post, the government could refuse to extradite Assange even if the courts approved it.
"Nor is that unusual; I don't know of any states that give the final decision to courts instead of to the executive."
____
Did your friend, Professor Heller, "distort" your argument, too?