From Hammarskjöld to Assange - A Swedish Legacy Dishonoured

   
Sweden has a long history of service to the United Nations and adherence to its principles, as proclaimed on the government’s website: ”Over the years, more than 70,000 Swedes have served in the U.N. and many Swedes have served as mediators. Sweden has worded in many areas of the U.N., and has also begun the work with many important issues, including abolition of the death penalty, children’s rights, abolition of apartheid, the Convention against Torture.…”
   
The government has kept the rhetoric, but in recent years has begun to abandon the principles. Nowhere is that more evident than in its collaboration in the persecution of Julian Assange, which recently became the subject of unusually sharp criticism from the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
   
The Swedish government dismissed rapporteur Nils Melzer’s detailed criticism with a brief letter consisting largely of untruths, evasions and glaring omissions. In a bitter irony, the government’s spurious arguments were devised by a grand-niece of Dag Hammarskjöld, the revered and martyred secretary-general of the U.N.
  
That recent history of the Swedish government’s attitude and behaviour toward the United Nations is related in a PDF document at this address: https://julian-assange.se/docs/Sweden-UN.pdf