Delaying Tactics !

The name "Julian Assange " is as familiar in most countries of the world as the current crop of Hollywood male movie stars.    He has managed to gain media headlines on a regular basis for well over the past ten years, ever since he founded WikiLeaks and published secrets gained from the American government by colleagues embedded in the United States armed forces.

Assange is Australian by birth and he travelled the world with impunity while WikiLeaks revelations riled the American government.  He became a sought speaker on the world stage until his undoing in a Scandinavian country.  The subject of sex reared its ugly head.  There was an accusation of rape and Assange was ordered to appear in court and give his version of what had happened.

He feared that the Americans would slap a deportation order on him the moment he set foot in a Scandinavian country and fled to Britain, where he breached his bail conditions.  With British police ordered to perform an arrest he fled to the embassy of Ecuador, which offered him sanctuary.

Julian Assange has long been the bird in the gilded cage.  The London embassy has been ringed by uniformed British police to prevent his escape and he regularly appears on a small verandah to give a news conference to gathered journalists..  The rape accusation has been dropped, but the British are relentless in pursuing him over that bail breach and that massive ring of police around the embassy is being maintained at a cost of millions of dollars a year.

Assange was granted Ecuadorian citizenship and while he is chafed at his lack of freedom he lives in very comfortable circumstances.  He uses the internet to keep in touch with world fans and he continues to air his political views, and this has angered his hosts.  They have imposed sanctions that he must meet to remain in the embassy.

Julian Assange has commenced a lawsuit against his mentors with the claim that these sanctions are oppressive.   Spanish is the language of Ecuador and the court provided a translator so Assange could follow the flow of proceedings from Spanish to English, but the hearing has been adjourned because Assange claims the interpreter's version is unintelligible to him.

What seems to be missing is the Australian dialect.   The judge found that the court erred in appointing an interpreter who only spoke " English " , apparently under the impression that the Australian dialect is incomprehensible to other anglophones.

The wily Assange has become the master of deploying unusual delaying tactics.  He has lived for years - in plain sight but just out of reach of the law.   This time around he has presented the English courts with a new conundrum.  They must decide if the Australian language has strayed so far from the tongue spoken in the mother country that it requires an interpreter fluent in its dialect.

If so, " Australian " will need to be added to the vocabulary of recognised world languages.