Today Stockholm’s appeal court has rejected a demand to lift the arrest warrant against Julian Assange. This leaves him in limbo in Ecuador’s London embassy.

There is much to be said about the Swedish case against Assange. (It’s very thin.) One could speculate about the risk of Sweden handing him over to the US. (There might be a risk, but that is also the case in the UK.) But let me focus on something else: The Swedish prosecutor in this case, Marianne Ny.

Ny has stubbornly refused to go to London to interview Assange. She refused to do it when it could have been done at the Swedish embassy. And she refuses to do it now, at the Ecuadorian embassy.

Ny has claimed that prosecutors don’t travel abroad to interview people. She has claimed that it is too expensive. And she has presented the rather odd argument that Assange might not want to answer her questions anyway.

Recently the UK Foreign Office said it would “welcome a request by the Swedish prosecutor Marianne Ny to question Assange inside the Ecuadorian embassy and would be happy to facilitate such a move”. Link »

And today the Swedish appeal court made a special point about the prosecutors’ failure to examine alternative avenues of investigation. Link »

One could suspect that prosecutor Ny is acting in line with the interest of those who think that the best place to have Julian Assange tucked away is in limbo at the Ecuadorian embassy.

And one thing is for sure: Prosecutor Ny is not telling the truth when she claims that Swedish prosecutors do not go abroad to interview people.

A year and a half ago–when I worked in the European Parliament–I had a Swedish prosecutor, a Swedish police inspector, two members of the Belgian Federal Police and one (rather poor) translator barge into my flat in Brussels. At 7 o’clock in the morning.

The reason was a rather mundane tax dispute between me and Swedish authorities.

They looked around in my apartment (and impounded some letters from the Swedish tax authorities to me!), then invited me to a “voluntary” interview at the Belgian Federal Police headquarters the next day (where I was refused to have a lawyer present).

This clearly demonstrates that Swedish prosecutors happily do go abroad, even for minor cases (especially when it includes visiting an exciting foreign city).

It also demonstrates that Swedish prosecutors do not care care a bit about costs. The price tag for this whole operation, with international police assistance, must have been enormous. And absolutely not proportionate, taking the amount of money in my tax case into consideration. (If they had sent me a letter, I would happily have travelled to Stockholm to meet with them.)

This is how Swedish authorities act in a rather insignificant case about taxes. It makes it even more remarkable that they refuse to move at all–when it comes to an high profile case as that of Julian Assange, with its high level political and geopolitical implications.

Prosecutor Marianne Ny should be removed from the Assange case. (Especially as Chief Prosecutor Eva Finné already dismissed the whole case back in August 2010, before Ny suddenly entered the scene to reopen it.)

/ HAX