The day that the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange was dragged from the Ecuadorean embassy in London by police after a seven-year sojourn, the lawyer Elisabeth Massi Fritz requested an appeal that she hoped would finally bring him to justice in Sweden.

For five years Fritz, 52, has represented a Swedish woman who claims that Assange raped her in 2010 during a visit to Stockholm. Since then, Assange has hidden from Swedish prosecutors, claiming that their attempts to investigate him are little more than a smokescreen to extradite him to the US, where he faces espionage charges over his work for WikiLeaks.

In April, Ecuador revoked Assange’s citizenship and he was taken from its embassy to Belmarsh prison in south London. It seemed that he would