> Conveniently, he cannot stand trial in France, which has also called for his arrest based on their own investigations, because he chose to become an international fugitive in Lebanon.

(Without getting into value judgments about the merits of the case,) this quote from Leo McGarry comes to mind:

> Well, that's why he did it. You can't fault him for having a winning strategy.

http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTransc...

Nation states would never put out empty statements they know they legally cannot act on to soothe other nation states, or, less charitable to the French government, collude with other nation states to imprison inconvenient actors.

I know the tech scene tends to fawn over Japanese culture, but business and government there lean conservative like every other nation state right now. My experience is that it’s 100% possible some xenophobes within industry have a very “Brexit-like” mentality about their nation and the fear of Renault-Nissan culture clash was leveraged to trump up charges.

Note I said it’s possible. Ultimately none of us really know, but the Japanese are “just people” too. No reason to believe they’re aren’t pulling an “Assange” like the west.

ofc he can't stand trial in france bc they will extradite him to japan instead. he got the assange problem.

More likely they would hand him to France. Lebanon gets a lot more out of France than Japan.