[ad_1]
it’s time. It’s not that I really have a lot of sympathy for Julian Assange. Basically, he’s always been a bit of a narcissist in my opinion. But I am very annoyed by the overreach of American law.
It all started with Sweden issues red notice for suspected rape caseI felt like this was a cue from somewhere else – probably the US – to try to pressure Assange on press freedom issues. This happened in 2010! It turned into an extradition to the UK that was clearly pre-planned by the US.
To anyone who cares to look closely at American law, it looks like it was invented off the back of an extremely stupid mule – one with a flatulence eating disorder. It rarely seems to make any sense in any shape or form, just splatters indiscriminately. When you look at it from the perspective of how American law and procedure is used, Grand JuryTo elected judges and prosecutors, they see a legal system warped by legal corruption. That’s not even counting its bizarre sentencing and incarceration policies. Or its myriad and varied law enforcement agencies, most of which seem to exist purely to allow different law enforcement and prosecutorial agencies to spend an inordinate amount of their time competing with one another.
The main lesson I draw from this Swedish/British/American episode is simple.
New Zealand should completely revisit its extradition treaty with the United States. For decades, U.S. extradition requests and arrests of multiple countries and targets have seemed less about the law and more about U.S. domestic politics. See Prosecution. This fits into the whole political nature of American law and has little to do with how we operate our legal system here. Personally, I worry about the bad behavior of American political legal tactics undermining our own legal process.
Regardless, the way the US executes extradition requests in the US and UK has significantly delayed justice and resolution because it is clearly politically motivated. Of course, there are pro-US elements like John Key and his armed criminals attacking DotCom, or the legal failings of Phil Goff’s previous “war on terror” legislation.
Not to mention the blatant kidnapping of foreign citizens by the United States, most of whom are clearly innocent, without any effective judicial oversight and taken to black jails and military prisons. Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp The prison has been a site of torture and ill-treatment for 22 years, and 30 inmates are still being held there, largely because the federal government is afraid to allow them access to civil legal services and courts.
It seems to me that the legal battles over extradition involve mostly US laws that have little to do with the laws to which the target is actually subject. This is the case with Julian Assange, an Australian citizen who collected information freely provided by a whistleblower in his capacity as a journalist. Whether the US has the right to prosecute seems to depend entirely on their claim that they have that right.
Because the US has clearly violated the intent of the extradition treaty for decades, I believe we need to amend our extradition laws to explicitly require the US to prove that its extradition request complies with New Zealand law, not US law, before it can proceed.
From a New Zealand perspective, many US laws are simply incomprehensible in legal terms, as the US political system never seems to be able to review or definitively abandon the more stupid or outdated legislation. Most “political” US extraditions seem to use the strangest laws, such as the US extradition of Kim DotCom on charges of “criminal Piracy, Money Laundering, Blackmail and Telecommunications fraud”, of which only Money Laundering A similar situation exists in New Zealand. Fraud is just Obtaining or causing loss by deceptive means In any case, and it does not incur a harsh penalty of up to 20 years in prison.
In addition, the United States needs to establish strict time and process limits for producing evidence. It should not be allowed to produce any evidence that it did not have at the time the extradition request was made.
The farce of obtaining helicopter landing permission for an armed criminal, after receiving the compliant cooperation of weak-willed politicians, apparently just to gather evidence for an extradition request from the United States, should never be repeated. The most effective way to do this is to have it inadmissible at an extradition hearing.
Likewise, extradition requests from any country should follow a short timetable. If the requesting country is not prepared to make a final decision in a New Zealand court almost immediately (within the legal timetable), then their request should not be accepted. There is no particular reason to hold countless status hearings.
related articles
[ad_2]
Source link
