If you actually bothered to read the papers Assange's own legal team lodged with the English courts you'd know that both the defence and prosecution accepted what he was accused of would be rape under English law.
@tgasson - unfortunately I can't reply to your next message, but with regards to links: you can view most of the case literature at BAILII and the Supreme Court website. Because Assange made numerous appeals his legal filings are numerous. Link here: http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/sino_search_1.cgi?sort=rank...
A more succint summary can be found at David Allen Green's blog - Assange's legal team did at first try to argue it wouldn't count as rape, but this was rejected by two courts, and when they subsequently appealed to the UK Supreme Court his defence accepted the point and dropped the argument: http://jackofkent.com/2012/06/assange-would-the-rape-allegat...
Assange's legal defence against the extradition was primarily on a matter of procedural law regarding whether Sweden had the judicial authority to extradite him in the first place.
I hope you will forgive my rather blunt tone - I am not a lawyer, but I have the pleasure (perhaps?!) of living with one. As I've said in other posts here, I'm more than happy to believe Assange is the victim of a conspiracy, but I don't think that is an outright certainty. I perhaps naively hold the English legal system in some regard, although I accept others may not!
Sorry I wasn't aware of that. Do you have a link? Best I can find is [1] which states
In respect of Offence 4, Mr Assange contended that whilst rape was a Framework Offence and therefore didn't require dual criminality, the conduct described in the EAW was not fairly and accurately described and that if it had it would not be rape.
