British Judge Approves Assange Bail, Again

For the second time in 48 hours, a British judge has agreed to release WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on 240,000 pounds bail. For the second time Assange remains in custody.

The new excuse, according to the BBC, is that the people who provided the bail money for Assange will have to fill out a lot of paperwork at a police station, and that the government will be keeping Assange until that is finished, which almost certainly won’t be today. Assange’s pending release is, as ever, pending.

The first judge, Howard Riddle, agreed to bail Assange on Tuesday but the release was overturned pending an appeal. The Swedish government, oddly enough, insists they weren’t the ones who appealed the decision, and rather that it was a British prosecutor who blocked the release.

Sweden provided no real evidence in the first case, and didn’t add any additional evidence in the second case, making it entirely a function of whether the British could find a judge willing to block a bail release without evidence. It seems that they could not.

Yet Assange is still not a (semi) free man, and until he actually walks out of detention there will always be a concern that some other excuse will come along to keep him from being released.