Of course, Dotcom and his associates immediately filed appeals and today in the Court of Appeal in Wellington, their hearing got underway.<\/p>\n
Lawyer Grant Illingworth, representing Van der Kolk and Ortmann, told the Court that the case had \u201cgone off the rails\u201d during the initial 10-week extradition hearing in 2015, arguing that the case had merited \u201cmeaningful\u201d consideration by a judge, something which failed to happen.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt all went wrong. It went absolutely, totally wrong,\u201d Mr. Illingworth\u00a0said<\/a>. \u201cWe were not heard.\u201d<\/p>\n As expected, Illingworth underlined the belief that under New Zealand law, a person may only be extradited for an offense that could be tried in a criminal court locally. His clients\u2019 cases do not meet that standard, the lawyer argued.<\/p>\n Turning back the clocks more than six years, Illingworth again raised the thorny issue of the warrants used to authorize the raids on the Megaupload defendants.<\/p>\n It had previously been established that New Zealand\u2019s GCSB intelligence service had illegally spied on Dotcom and his associates in the lead up to their arrests. However, that fact was not disclosed to the District Court judge who authorized the raids.<\/p>\n \u201cWe say that there was misleading conduct at this stage because there was no reference to the fact that information had been gathered illegally by the GCSB,\u201d he\u00a0said<\/a>.<\/p>\n But according to Justice Forrest Miller, even if this defense argument holds up the High Court had already found there was a prima facie case to answer \u201cwith bells on\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cThe difficulty that you face here ultimately is whether the judicial process that has been followed in both of the courts below was meaningful, to use the Canadian standard,\u201d Justice Miller\u00a0said<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019re going to have to persuade us that what Justice Gilbert [in the High Court] ended up with, even assuming your interpretation of the legislation is correct, was wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n Although the US seeks to extradite Dotcom and his associates on 13 charges, including racketeering, copyright infringement, money laundering and wire fraud, the Court of Appeal previously confirmed that extradition could be granted based on just some of the charges.<\/p>\n The stakes couldn\u2019t be much higher. The FBI says that the \u201cMegaupload Conspiracy\u201d earned the quartet $175m and if extradited to the US, they could face decades in jail.<\/p>\n While Dotcom was not in court today, he has been active on Twitter.<\/p>\n \u201cThe court process went \u2018off the rails\u2019 when the only copyright expert Judge in NZ was >removed< from my case and replaced by a non-tech Judge who asked if Mega was \u2018cow storage\u2019. He then simply copy\/pasted 85% of the US submissions into his judgment,” Dotcom\u00a0wrote<\/a>.<\/p>\n Dotcom also appeared to question the suitability of judges at both the High Court and Court of Appeal for the task in hand.<\/p>\n \u201cJustice Miller and Justice Gilbert (he wrote that High Court judgment) were business partners at the law firm Chapman Tripp which represents the Hollywood Studios in my case. Both Judges are now at the Court of Appeal. Gilbert was promoted shortly after ruling against me,\u201d Dotcom added.<\/p>\n Dotcom is currently\u00a0suing the New Zealand government<\/a>\u00a0for billions of dollars in damages over the warrant which triggered his arrest and the demise of Megaupload.<\/p>\n The hearing is expected to last up to two-and-a-half weeks.<\/p>\n Source: \u00a0![\"TorrentFreak\"](\"http:\/\/worldjusticenews.com\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/11\/torrentfreak.png\")
<\/a> TorrentFreak.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"