WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has slammed Sweden over Gottfrid Svartholm’s case. Since his transfer to a Danish prison, the Pirate Bay founder has been kept in solitary confinement and denied access to mail and reading material.

Last month, Gottfrid lost his bid for an appeal to the Swedish Supreme Court and was extradited to Denmark, where he faces charges of hacking into the mainframe computers of CSC, a Danish IT company.

According to personal accounts from Gottfrid’s mother and lawyer, the Pirate Bay founder is being treated like a dangerous criminal, deprived of the basic freedoms like interacting with other inmates and receiving mail and books – rights that he had while detained in Sweden.

His solitary confinement is causing the most concern to Kristina Svartholm, Gottfrid's mother, especially as it remains unclear for what reason he is being barred from interaction.

"His lawyer…hasn’t really found any legal reasons for this. The court – when they decided about him being put into this place of arrest – they never made a decision about the solitary thing," Kristina Svartholm told RT reiterating his innocence.

"According to what the prosecutor said to the media…she said that ‘I never made such a decision’. So it’s difficult to find out who made this decision, and since you don’t know who made the decision you can’t complain properly about it," she added.

Ms. Svartholm has written a letter to Amnesty, hoping that they will speak out on behalf of her son’s treatment. He is apparently being treated as if he were a “dangerous, violent and aggressive criminal,” TorrentFreak reported.

“[In Sweden] I visited him every week, unsupervised, sometimes with an additional person. He rang me daily throughout the fall and his letters etc were not checked. For a long time he has had every opportunity in the world to complicate investigations for the Danish police if he had wanted,” she said.

'Embarrassing' treatment

Gottfrid’s lawyer Luise Høi said the conditions of Gottfrid’s detention are unacceptable.

“In reality he is [kept in solitary confinement], because of a decision made by the Danish prison service,” she told RT.

“Gottfreid has been in Denmark for 16 days now, and the restrictions were put upon him from day one. Two weeks ago I asked for a formal decision from the prison service, so that I could actually tell my client what was going on… I received…three, four sentences just referring to this section in the Danish legislation: ‘He is to be put under special restrictions.’ It was a big surprise to me because normally these restrictions are only used if people are very violent towards other inmates.”

If the authorities want to exclude Gottfrid from access to anyone except his lawyer and prison staff, a special application must be filed.

“I have been both a prosecutor – many years ago – and I have been employed with the Ministry of Justice, and to be honest, these days I’m a bit embarrassed that they treat him this way," Høi added.

While Høi is not able to talk about the current investigation, she pointed out that after one month of Gottfrid being kept in solitary in Sweden, because of the Danish investigation, he was taken out.

“I have been able to talk to him about the investigations–while he was able to take visits without restrictions in Sweden. So he has been able to talk to people about the Danish investigation for months now…”

She speculated that this could be because of the degree of embarrassment the case causes the Danish state, and referred to the case in the higher court in Sweden.

“He was not convicted of hacking the…Scandinavian bank….I’m expecting him not to be convicted of anything in Denmark,” she said.

'Political prisoner' - Assange

At the same time, Wikileaks’ Julian Assange has gone so far as to call Gottfrid a political prisoner.

“It is time someone says it like it is: Gottfrid Svartholm Warg is a political prisoner and Sweden has fallen off the map of decent nations in its treatment of him. Gottfrid has always been ideologically driven to inform the world; he worked tirelessly to help WikiLeaks expose the slaughter of civilians in Iraq by a US helicopter gunship and was responsible for an important part of our infrastructure,” Assange said on Wednesday as quoted by TorrentFreak.

“There are thousands of alleged cyber criminals, but instead of dealing with these cases, we see vast resources diverted yet again by the Swedish state into smashing Gottfrid. These attempts include the first trial of Gottfrid after US pressure (extensively documented in US embassy cables released by WikiLeaks), his subsequent rendering from Cambodia by the Swedish intelligence service SAPO, his months of incommunicado detention in Sweden, and now his irregular extradition to Denmark – for a charge he was just acquitted of.”

Russian authorities, meanwhile, have shut down the torrent site RuTor.org, a site registered to Gottfrid. The site was charged with distributing copyrighted material, including the 2013 blockbuster film ‘Stalingrad,’ the highest-grossing homemade film at the Russian box office.