Hacker News Reader

Comment by bingohbangoh | Hacker News Reader

The US has "bigger guns diplomacy" here -- they can kind of do whatever they want to unless the country really wants to put up a fight. There's a lot of non-empty threats the US will make.

France for instance will protect her own citizens at all costs. It's why Roman Polanski, a convicted rapist, still walks around a free man there. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski_sexual_abuse_ca...

View on HN

It's more that the UK and US have an extradition treaty and as long as the request meets the terms of the treaty then the extradition will proceed, barring some sort of domestic political issue. It's not like the US is threatening to attack the UK if Assange is not handed over.

Yes but that treaty was signed because of the "bigger guns" diplomacy part.

On what do you base this. I just skimmed the treaty [0], and it seems completly symmetrical. It even has a clause allowing a nation to not extradite when the death penelty is involved, which I believe was included as an anti-us provision.

The only special consideration I found for the us was defining "Competent Authority", which is left undefined for the other signatories.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/treaty-document/108th-congress/23/d...

I guess I would consider that an opinion --though of course rationally it makes sense-- without evidence that the UK officials who agreed to the treaty were intimidated into signing it due to a fear of violence (actual or financial or...) towards the UK from the US. My opinion is that the sort of people who signed the 2003 treaty were not particularly concerned about preserving civil rights for British citizens, and the 2003 treaty did normalize evidentiary standards between the two countries that had been lopsided in the UK's favor since 1870.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com