extradition

くわたくん、赤字がわかりません。教えて下さい。（佐藤）
WikiLeaks’ Founder, in a Gilded British Cage
By DAVID CARR

The man in the rubber boots and a thick coat to protect against the evening chill walked purposefully about a farm here, scattering pheasants as he went. He could have been an English gentleman out for a bit of hunting, except he carried no gun.

In his current circumstance, the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange is more hunted than hunter, fighting extradition to Sweden on accusations of sexual misconduct while struggling to maintain the influence of WikiLeaks even as he remains here at Ellingham Hall, the country manor house of Vaughan Smith, a former soldier and journalist who runs a restaurant and club for journalists in London.

Mr. Assange and a few WikiLeaks staff members who are staying at the farm joined some friends of Mr. Smith on Saturday for an outdoor lunch. I took the train up from London to get a first-hand look at Mr. Assange’s gilded, remote sanctuary.

In December, Mr. Assange was unable to meet the terms of bail because he had no permanent address — he is an itinerant who leads a stateless organization that operates in an online world without borders. Mr. Smith, after consulting his wife, Pranvera Shema, decided they would provide Mr. Assange with an address, a roof over his head and a place to manage his legal case.

“None of us knew it would go on this long,” Mr. Smith said, “but I think that Julian deserves justice in the same way as anyone else, so we have found a way to make it work.”

It has not all been rural bliss. There have been times when as many of 20 people from WikiLeaks stayed at the house. “I’d open a cupboard and another one would fall out,” Mr. Smith said. And then there is the matter of the farm animals. “Julian messed with my pigs,” Mr. Smith said, smiling.

Ellingham Hall, 130 miles north of London, is a working farm, and Mr. Assange decided to use the pigs to make a film about the credit card companies that have denied him the means to raise donations. Mr. Smith said Mr. Assange induced the pigs to break through an electric fence and make themselves at home in a nearby berry patch, a bit of porcine anarchy that did not amuse the farm manager.

Standing near the pig pen at dusk, Mr. Assange said it was not his fault, pointing to two young males. “They hacked the fence,” he said, deploying the terminology that has made WikiLeaks and its founder household names.

Mr. Assange, who has become “Uncle Julian” to Mr. Smith’s young children, seems less international man of mystery than a person frozen in the odd circumstance of the moment. He wears an electronic bracelet, reports to the local police every day and, to the extent he can, continues to push the WikiLeaks agenda.

Even here he sees enemies everywhere, suggesting helicopters have swooped in for occasional reconnaissance, and at one point backing me out of a kind of war room near the kitchen. “You can’t be in here,” he said, closing the door with a wan smile.

But if Mr. Assange is in compliance with the conditions of his bail, he remains at the margins of the law. Federal authorities in the United States and Australia continue to investigate whether the release of classified information by WikiLeaks constitutes criminal behavior that has endangered various operatives. And Swedish prosecutors are seeking his extradition for questioning — he has yet to be charged — on accusations of sexual misconduct with two women.

As the controversy has grown, some WikiLeaks staff members have left, saying Mr. Assange runs the organization less transparently than he should. In his view, he is guilty of nothing more than challenging powerful elites, but his current isolation, in acute relief in the English countryside, is a consequence of his choices.

After a week in which his autobiography was published against his wishes, he was not much in the mood for another media moment, but he was friendly in an argumentative way as long as I did not take out a notebook.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/26/business/media/julian-assange-in-a-gilded-british-cage.html?_r=1&ref=global-home