Swedish human rights activist Anna Ardin is glad Julian Assange is free.
But the claims she has made about him suggest she would have every reason not to wish him well.
Ardin is fiercely proud of Assange’s work for WikiLeaks, and insists that it should never have landed him behind bars.
“We have the right to know about the wars that are fought in our name,” she says.
Speaking to Ardin over Zoom in Stockholm, it quickly becomes clear that she has no problem keeping what she sees as the two Assanges apart in her head - the visionary activist and the man who she says does not treat women well.
She is at pains to describe him neither as a hero nor a monster, but a complicated man.
I still see absolutely no reason to lock him up. Just because he’s biased towards one side that doesn’t make the crimes of the other side any better. Ideally, yes, he should publish everything. But that’s not the case. And it’s still irrelevant.
Yeah I’m not necessarily in disagreement there. Though I respect those whistle-blowers who are willing to be a martyr for a cause they believe in. Ellsberg faced justice head on, for example. Meanwhile Snowden fled to one of the most corrupt countries in the world with a vendetta against the USA, and Greenwald is now parroting Kremlin propaganda strangely. Assange is somewhere in the middle for me.
At the end of the day, Assange effectively did face justice and came out the other side, so I give credit.
Strictly speaking, he didn’t. He ran out the clock on the statute of limitations for the all but one of the sexual assault charges in Sweden while in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, and prosecutors said enough evidence was lost to time that they weren’t going to be able to indict on the remaining charge.
https://www.reuters.com/article/world/sweden-drops-assange-rape-investigation-after-nearly-10-years-idUSKBN1XT1PW/
I honestly don’t condemn any whistleblower for running away from “justice”. Because there is absolutely no justice in any of this.