Boiling the frog....

Good news of the week is that after 4 years of imprisonment or house arrest the Greeks have finally dropped all charges against young Andrew Symeou.

Who he? Well, he was one of the victims of the outrageous European Arrest Warrant that allows some incompetent judge in some corrupt European jurisdiction to issue a warrant for the arrest of anyone in another European country. As ever, the excuse was anti-terrorism and as usual it has never been used for this purpose. One of the most despicable cases was the arrest of an Australian academic in transit from the US to Australia at Heathrow under a German EAW, a country that he had never visited for holocaust denial which is not an offence under English law. Fortunately the English judge threw it out.

Most EAW cases have been for trivia, sometimes minor motoring offences.

I have banged on previously about the destruction of civil liberties under Blair that Cameron seems disinclined to do anything about. Perhaps there is not enough Parliamentary  time to do anything about the 3,600 new arrestable offences created by NuLab, what with Bills to ban animals in circuses and reform of the House of Lords. I get almost no response. The English seem not to care. It seems like a case of boiling the frog, so that when the public wake up to the fact that their ancient liberties have been almost totally eroded it is too late. Tell them that the EAW has abrogated Magna Carta, habeas corpus et al and you get a look of incomprehension.

Here is what the excellent Dan Hannan said in the DT:

Never mind 42 days: under the EAW, you can be locked up for years without trial.

Congratulations to Andrew Symeou, a young Englishman who has finally been acquitted by a Greek court four years after being wrongly accused of manslaughter. The merest glance at the facts should have been enough to establish Andrews’s innocence. Yet an eighteen-year-old boy ended up losing nearly four years of his life over a case of straightforward mistaken identity.

Why did Andrew not become a cause célèbre? Where were all the civil liberties campaigners, so ready to criticise the McKinnon indictment and the US-UK extradition treaty? A few of them, in fairness, did take up Andrew’s case. But many others saw the whole business as a Eurosceptic plot to discredit the European Arrest Warrant. I hope those who were readier to condemn an innocent man than to examine their Euro-integrationist prejudices will ponder what it would be like to spend eleven months in one of the worst prisons in Europe, to let four irreplaceable years of your life slip by while your friends pass through university, to watch your parents exhaust their savings shuttling back and forth Greece, all without your case coming to trial.

As long as the EAW remains in place, anyone – literally anyone – might go through a similar experience. Every year, thousands of people are hoicked away from their home countries without any prima facie evidence being presented, often on charges as trivial as driving offences. At the same time, actual terrorist suspects use the European Convention on Human Rights to evade detention or deportation. My masters, are you mad?