Older readers, very older readers, OK, dead readers may recall the humorous column “Beachcomber“, which ran in the Daily Express for many a decade, famous for Dr Strabismus (whom God preserve) of Utrecht, and transcripts of high court proceedings under Mr Justice Cocklecarrot, whose attempts to get to the bottom of a suit involving the Plaza Hotel and the Persian Filthistan Trio who specialised in the human see-saw in their foyer. These were stories that would run for up to a dozen, admittedly not very funny, episodes.

Proceedings in WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s third extradition hearing would, if reports are to be believed, fit right into the Beachcomber oeuvre. For two days, two Justices have been sitting to hear Assange’s appeal against an order to extradite him to Sweden, made in February.

These august personages, representing the near-pinnacle of English law, have spent a more than a day considering the details of two one-night stands and a tackle rub undertaken nearly a year ago in a faraway city.

They have considered the mechanics of condom application, of the possible retroactivity of consent after being penetrated while asleep, or half-asleep, and of how much swing-room a man in the full flush of enthusiasm may be permitted in a single bed — all of this bound up with a series of arguments about the provenance of a European Arrest Warrant, and comparative European legal systems.

They have now reserved their judgment for another month. And if the loser from that decision can find a point of law, the case will go to the UK Supreme Court — and would have gone to the Law Lords, if it hadn’t been for the spoilsports in New Labour, with their new-fangled separation-of-powers nonsense.

Assange surprised everyone in the weeks leading up to this hearing by changing his legal team, replacing lead solicitor Mark Stephens and barrister Geoffrey Robertson with a team led by human rights supremo Gareth Pierce (who is, of course, a woman), with barristers Mark Summers and Ben Emmerson. No one is saying anything about the reason for the change-over, but one clear purpose of it has been to change tack — the earlier attempt to resist extradition had linked a passage to Sweden with eventual extradition to America, and played up some of the harsher aspects of Swedish justice — in-camera trials for s-x crimes, absence of bail, allegations of systemic bias and the like.

These have been largely discarded by the new team, who have focused on the more mundane question of whether the European Arrest Warrant by which extradition is being sought had been properly issued, whether the crimes of which Assange is accused (but not charged with) are extraditable offences in the UK, and whether there is even a case to answer in Sweden.

It’s the last of these that sent the court into yet another raking over of the nights that Assange spent with Anna Ardin, the left Christian/bis-xual/Middle-East activist/animal rights campaigner/fetish club proprietor who had been organising a speaking gig for him in Sweden, and Sofia Wilen, a young, mildly besotted student, whom Ardin contemptuously dubbed “pink cashmere sweater girl”.

Assange’s encounter with the latter involved morning s-x, which Wilen claimed was initiated while she was asleep, and without a condom, which she had previously made clear was a condition of entry. By Wilen’s account, she consented to the s-x pretty soon after it had begun, and by the accounts of friends she had spoken to of the incident after, she had claimed to be only “half-asleep” at the time. Wilen decided to go to the police a few days later, having tried and failed to get in touch with Assange to ask him to take an STI test.

Ardin had had a one-night stand with Assange a few days earlier, the night he moved into her flat. She went to the police with Sofia, after the latter had contacted her. At the time, Ardin’s allegations warranted only two accusations of misdemeanour “annoyance” — the deliberate tearing of a condom, and an uninvited Johnson rub a few days later.

However, when Wilen’s r-pe accusation had been dumped by the prosecutor and then reinstated by another prosecutor two weeks later, Ardin had added another accusation — that of s-xual coercion, alleging that Assange had physically prevented her from applying a condom.

Arguing the minutiae of this in a British appeals court has brought to the surface one big truth about s-x crime law across Western countries, and that is that no one really knows how the laws work at their boundaries any more.

Assange’s team argues that “s-x while sleeping” with a previously consenting partner doesn’t count as a crime in the UK, even if a wish concerning a condom has not been honoured. If there is no “double criminality” — i.e. in the UK and Sweden — then the warrant cannot be served.

In fact, what has happened in the UK and Sweden is that s-x crime offences acts have been extended to ostensibly cover s-x while sleeping — without the question of whether consent has to be re-established for each encounter. Commonsense and common law says not, which makes parts of the new-fangled s-x offences acts unworkable — but more so in somewhere such as the UK where precedent plays a greater role.

Trying to deflect this has led the crown prosecution service, acting for Sweden, into some very funny places. Clare Montgomery QC for the Crown Prosecution Service, focused on Ardin’s statement that “she let Assange [finish] undressing her” and argued that this was clearly a case of Ardin “submitting” to Assange and to say otherwise would be to establish a Victorian morality where a man might have his way.

But conversely it strikes one that Montgomery’s idea of “submission” is Victorian itself, suggesting that allowing yourself to be undressed isn’t a form of consent, however grumpy or begrudging it might be — and that the whole case exposes the way in which ever-greater expansion of the s-x crime remit into complex social situations is entirely based on a Victorian idea of female s-xuality: that women must be made allowances for because they are so easily seduced/influenced/bamboozled by caddish males, even when no violent or coercive behaviour is present. Once you’ve crossed that line, women’s equality and freedom is sacrificed to the coercive powers of the state — something that UK New Labour and Sweden’s state feminists have very little problem with. In those circumstances not only does no mean no, sometimes yes means no as well.

Going to this amount of detail in an appeals court courts absurdity, and this appears to have been the Assange team’s strategy — to show that much of the Swedish prosecutor’s work could have been done by phone, without the need for a European Arrest Warrant. As one of his poobah justices remarked, the whole principle on which the European Arrest Warrant is based — European Union — would also dictate that all steps short of a warrant should be exercised before an EAW is applied for.

Should Assange succeed in defeating the EAW, this may well be the point by which it is done. The case has become a focus for some long-overdue hard thinking about the degree of scrutiny — or lack of it — applied to accusations of r-pe and s-xual misconduct, and the presumption of innocence — or lack of it — accorded to those accused of it.

But it has also shone a light on the anti-democratic nature of the European Arrest Warrant, which can be used to spirit people off to foreign jurisdictions, many of which have long remand periods, where they may be subject to prejudice and official corruption.

Ninety-five percent of EAWs are honoured — not because they are all well-made, but because most people lack the resources to challenge them, or even the knowledge that they have the right to do so. The odds are still stacked against Assange on this matter, but going by the tenor of the justices’ remarks on these questions, he may have cause for greater optimism in the weeks to come.

“Justice must not only be seen to be done. It must be seen to be believed.”

— Beachcomber