The Swedish systems allows for this, so while it may not be corrupt, its laws are not the same as in the U.S.

If it helps, what he is accused of was also found to be rape under English law, and may well be rape under other laws, so it isn't necessarily the case that Swedish laws are different, or particularly unusual.

The accusation of rape (translated into English for the High Court) reads as follows:

On 17 August 2010, in the home of the injured party [SW] in Enkoping, Assange deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep. was in a helpless state. ... The sexual act was designed to violate the injured party's sexual integrity.

To me that seems to have the key issues of sex and a lack of consent, that tend to be the corner-stone of definitions of rape. Whether or not there was consent (or the events actually happened) is obviously a question for trial.

I'm not an expert on Swedish criminal procedure, but the willingness of the "injured parties" to "file charges" is usually irrelevant in criminal justice systems. The state brings the charges, the "injured parties" may be witnesses, if needed.

Actually there isn't such a thing in most of Europe any more (in theory). In July the ECtHR ruled that life-long prison sentence must be reducible or it amounts to inhumane/degrading treatment (contrary to Article 3 of the ECHR). The case was Vinter v UK, you can find the full judgment here and a summary here. The best tl;dr is probably this quote from the latter:

There were a number of reasons why, for a life sentence to remain compatible with Article 3, there had to be both a prospect of release and a possibility of review. Firstly, it was axiomatic that a prisoner could not be detained unless there were legitimate penological grounds for that detention. The balance between the justifications for detention was not necessarily static and could shift in the course of the sentence. It was only by carrying out a review at an appropriate point in the sentence that these factors or shifts could be properly evaluated. Secondly, incarceration without any prospect of release or review carried the risk that the prisoner would never be able to atone for his offence, whatever he did in prison and however exceptional his progress towards rehabilitation. Thirdly, it would be incompatible with human dignity for the State forcefully to deprive a person of his freedom without at least providing him with the chance to someday regain that freedom. Moreover, there was now clear support in European and international law for the principle that all prisoners, including those serving life sentences, should be offered the possibility of rehabilitation and the prospect of release if rehabilitation was achieved.

But that has been seen by some as classic European, human-rights, wishy-washy liberalism at its finest. It doesn't that people can't be locked up for life, but if they are, there has to be some review process and some way (more than merely theoretical) that they can "earn" their release.

Unfortunately, your "statistic" to "shut people ... up for good" isn't actually true.

Suicide and Murder Rates for the US and Great Britain are about the same

According to the United Nations (warning, .xls file), the intentional homicide rate in Great Britain (the UK collects different data for England and Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, so I've combined the E+W and Scotland data to get a GB one) in 2011 was 1.1 per 100,000. In the United States it was 4.7. The suicide rates are similar, but the intentional homicide rates are way off; over four times as high.

That said, according to the FBI about 69% of homicides in the US in 2012 involved the use of firearms. So ignoring all firearm-related homicides, the US's homicide rate is about 1.4 per 100,000, so still higher than Great Britain's.

But none of this means anything on its own, as far as policy implications go. Working out whether bans on certain classes of firearms are necessary and/or proportionate is a very complex task, and a couple of statistics are hardly conclusive.

Your "statistic" was still wrong, though.

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On the murder of Lee Rigby, there are a few subtleties you may have missed. First the assailants killed him by hitting him with a car, and then stabbing him with knives (apparently unable to decapitate him) before anyone could react, even if they were armed - it's unclear if there were even people nearby at the time (one of the first 'witnesses' got involved after thinking it was an accident and trying to give the victim first aid). The assailants had a revolver, so it wasn't just knives; it is possible that if they had anticipated resistance from someone with a firearm, they would have shot him (rather than stabbed) and may have shot others nearby.

The suggestion that anyone would have "kicked the shit" out of them is rather ludicrous in any event. As it happened, after their attack the suspects waited calmly for the police to arrive (talking to passers-by); when the police did approach, they charged them ineffectually, were shot, and taken into custody.

I fail to see how widespread access to firearms would have made the situation any better, or how passers-by beating them up would have furthered the interests of justice.

On normal cases within the EU (cases which aren't state v state or involving the Commission) the CJEU acts as a court of reference. When an issue of EU law comes up in a national court, that court can refer specific questions to the CJEU (such as "does Article X of Directive Y mean that in situation Z this thing is illegal?"). The CJEU then answers those specific questions (sometimes with more general guidance on that area of law) and the national court takes the answers and applies them to its final judgment. That guidance can then be used in any other national court ruling on a similar issue.

The ECtHR is a court of last resort; but it only hears matters involving states. If a person believes their state has violated their rights under the ECHR, and they have exhausted all appeal options domestically, they can bring a case before the ECtHR against the state.

In this case, there was a major issue of EU law; the application of the E-Commerce Directive (which provides limitations on liability for, among others, websites which host comment sections). Previous legal thinking was that the E-Commerce Directive was designed to cover this sort of thing (although some national courts have been rolling this back, mainly on copyright grounds). However, the Estonian courts decided the E-Commerce Directive (or rather, its national implementation) didn't apply due to the facts and didn't refer the case to the CJEU (which they might have been wrong about).

The ECtHR was very clear in its ruling that it wasn't in a position to comment on this finding; their position was to determine that, assuming the Estonian courts were right about all other things (including interpreting EU law), had there been a breach of the applicant's Article 10 rights. And they found there hadn't been.

It's worth noting that much of the cost in archiving the episodes came from the increasingly large fees the BBC would have had to pay to the various production people involved. During the 70s there was a big scare about home taping TV (the chief person at the MPAA famously telling Congress that the home tape player was to the TV industry what the "Boston stranger was to the woman home alone" or something similar) - the fear was that if people could have stuff on tape they wouldn't have to buy anything new, and if broadcasters (like the BBC) could store episodes of TV shows for decades, they would stop commissioning new works and just show endless repeats.

The UK TV industry's way out was to force the broadcasters to sign contracts agreeing to pay "storage" fees for each year they kept the films, and these increased over time. So eventually the BBC decided it was prohibitively expensive to keep them...

Of course, as pointed out elsewhere, the episodes aren't actually out of copyright - only the broadcast copyrights are about to expire. As the director of the first Doctor Who episode is still alive, it will be at least 70 years (barring reform to copyright law) until the film itself is out of copyright.

After some digging, the first episode to definitely come out of copyright may be The Smugglers (s4e1), in 2068. Possibly The Time Meddler (s2e9) in 2057 or The Aztecs (s1e6) in 2065. Copyright is complicated.

Sadly even the Guardian reported the story, parroting the Press Association's version, without thinking to check what the EC actually had to say about it.

Double jeopardy has been limited, in that there are now fairly limited grounds on which a re-trial can happen. It only applies for certain "serious crimes" and only with the consent of the DPP, and after the Court of Appeal has quashed the original aquittal due to the existence of "new and compelling evidence". More details here.

As someone who's had to try to find this sort of "new and compelling evidence" in a criminal case (although the other way around - seeking to quash a conviction, rather than an acquittal), it's quite hard to do...

The powers granted under that law can be used on anybody for any reason whatsoever.

No! The powers can be used on (almost) anyone, but only for the specific reason of questioning them to determine if they are a terrorist. If they detained him to search him, to confiscate his computers, to intimidate him, to see if he had sensitive documents on him, to get information about Greenwald etc. they were breaking the law.

Secondly, even if they did detain him for that reason, they still have to act proportionately, rationally, and compatibly with the European Convention on Human Rights. If they don't do all of that, even if they acted within the Terrorism Act 2000 powers, they still broke the law.

Yes, this law is very broad and lacks checks, but there are other laws in place to provide them.

[As an aside, they only people this power can't be used against are actual, known terrorists... there's case law on that.]

That puzzled me as well; the law specifically states that the "right to a lawyer" (which can be delayed anyway) only applies when the person is detained at a police station, not anywhere else.

What really disturbs me, though, was that the only case on this law I could find involved a guy who was illegally detained and questioned under this law (despite actually being a terrorist). The judge didn't have a problem with the lack of a solicitor noting that even if one did come along "he would have nothing to do" because the person being questioned has to answer all questions and fully comply. Somehow the judge failed to spot that the solicitor might be able to point out that, as in that case, the initial detention was illegal...

I don't think a court would go along with that, I imagine the rules on double jeopardy would come into effect as it would be effectively prosecuting someone twice for the same thing,

There is; under this law they have to return the stuff within 7 days unless they're actually pressing charges/bringing criminal proceedings. See paragraph 11(2).

You'd think, but as it happens yesterday and today the UK is hosting a G8 summit. Now this is in the depths of Northern Ireland rather than London, but I imagine the principles are the same.

They can spy on everyone, provided at the time they gather all the data they aren't intentionally targeting any specific person they know is in the US. But until they get the data they can't know whose it is, or where they might be. The FISA Amendments Act is a really neat/sneaky piece of legislation.

The key word is "target"; it is illegal for the FISA system to be used to target people in the US. However, we've known for a while that the US Government has a "secret interpretation" of this law which the public isn't allowed to know, for reasons that have to be kept secret but partly because, if released, the information "could result in exceptionally grave and serious damage to the national security".

One of the main suggestions for what this interpretation is is based on the precise phrasing of the law; FISA prohibits the authorisation of any acquisition of information if it "intentionally target[s] any person known at the time of acquisition to be located in the United States."

So if the NSA (or whoever) gets an authorisation to acquire information on everyone so that, at a later date, they can search that information to find specific stuff on particular individuals, at the time when they acquire the data they are not "targeting" anyone, and they don't *know* that the people whose information they are gathering are located in the US.

It's a really well-crafted piece of legislation; I hope the legal draftsmen behind it got a bonus that year... it's even sneakier than all the PR statements coming out of the NSA and the tech companies involved.

So the bottom line is that this probably *isn't* illegal. But no one can tell for sure, because the people who have tried to sue over this have had their cases thrown out for various reasons.

How can two guys murdering someone in the street be a war (to the extent that the word still works in the 21st century)? These guys weren't part of some greater force, weren't on instructions from some nation, these were a couple of religious nutters who thought it was a good idea to kill someone.

Calling it war (or even terrorism) is to over-state it and glorify. It was (probably - we won't know until there's a conviction) murder. If guilty, they were just criminals. Politically-motivated criminals, perhaps, but still just criminals.