“The right to insufferable superiority is not enshrined in the UN declaration,” said Marina Hyde in The Guardian, “yet it continues to be extended to Julian Assange, along with a load of other rights” not granted to ordinary mortals. Last week, the WikiLeaks founder appeared, Eva Perón-like, on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, to announce that a UN panel had declared him the victim of a gross injustice. The Working Group on Arbitary Detention, made up of academic lawyers from South Korea, Mexico, Benin, Australia and Ukraine, had ruled that his voluntary confinement in the embassy amounted to “arbitrary detention”, and was in breach of international law. (However, its findings are not binding.) There are those who consider the prefix “UN” to be a “gold standard”. If…
