A Swedish appeals court has upheld the European Arrest Warrant for Julian Assange, who is sought in the country on allegations of rape for the eighth time.

Assange had attempted to appeal the warrant for his arrest, though not the charges, as a means of achieving escape from the Ecuadorian embassy where he has been holed up now for over four years.

Getting rid of that pesky warrant would allow him to escape the Ecuadorian embassy and head to somewhere nice and hot where he never has to worry about pesky sex offences ever again.

Of course he is still wanted in the UK for breaching bail conditions so even if the Swedes suddenly give up on prosecuting sex offences then Assange still has to leg it to the airport without London’s finest spotting him.

The statute of limitations on the rape allegations against Assange expires in 2020. There is no expiry on Assange's breach of bail conditions however so he could be staying where he is for a long time..

The WikiLeaks founder and chief, who is now 45, had attempted to tackle the Swedish warrant on seven previous occasions. Today's ruling marks the eighth time he has failed to have it withdrawn. They say that insanity is doing something that does not work over and over again.

Assange's lawyers have argued that his stay in the embassy amounts to arbitrary detention. They are matched in this claim by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (WGAD), which found earlier this year that Assange was being detained arbitrarily.

However, a district court in Sweden sighed and said that the arrest warrant was necessary because of Assange's likeliness to abscond or evade justice something proven by the fact he broke bail and hid in  an embassy. We doubt that the Swedes would have thought it a good thing that Assange was attempting to cast himself as the victim rather than the women who made the complaints.

Assange could have sorted this mess out years ago if he had just faced his accusers. Instead with his delusions of significance he was convinced that the US was out to get him. Something that really did not pan out, if he thought about it. He was arrested in the UK which was even more likely than the Swedes to send him to the US.