The vile Euro Arrest Warrant; heading for the bin?

 Don’t hold your breath, but the days of the wretched European Arrest Warrant may be numbered.

 

Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon; Dave may be getting something right at last.

 

He has until 2014 to exercise the UK’s opt-out rights on 130 crime and policing laws, which includes the EAW. It will also have the effect of rolling back the jurisdiction of another obscenity, the ECJ.

 

For reasons that may escape you, he will announce his proposals just before the Corby by-election in November,

 

The EAW was originally introduced to allow the speedy extradition of terrorist suspects. Like so many anti-terrorist laws, it has hardly ever been used for its proper purpose. Instead it has frequently been used for trivial ‘crimes’.

 

One of its malign characteristics is that the principle in international law of ‘double criminality’ was rejected. Under this principle the extradition application required that the alleged offence was a crime in both countries.

 

Since the EAW came into force a British person can be extradited for something that is not a crime under our laws, such as Holocaust denial. A particularly outrageous case was of the Australian returning home from the US was taken off the plane whilst in transit at LHR for this offence under a German EAW, a country that he has never visited. He was kept in jail for 3 weeks until a more sensible Judge freed him.

 

And as the Assanje ruling shows, the assumption that the EAW is only issued by a judicial authority i.e. a judge or magistrate exercising judicial powers, is no longer the case.  It can be issued by a civil servant working in a judicial department.

 

There have been some outrageous miscarriages of justice in extraditing people to countries where the administration of criminal law is corrupt or inefficient, and where the rights of the accused are minimal.

 

There was the infamous case of Andreas Symenou. He was accused of manslaughter after a brawl in a Greek nightclub. There was no evidence against him and the case was dropped. Unbeknownst to him, the prosecution appealed and he was duly arrested under an EAW. After 3 years in a Greek jail or under house arrest, the prosecution asked for an acquittal for lack of evidence.

 

Two British businessmen were extradited to Hungary on an EAW in 2005.  Seven years on, they are still awaiting trial. Habeas corpus is not big in Hungary (nor here after Blair).

 

In 1989, an English granny was acquitted of a drugs offence in France. She was unaware that the prosecution appealed in 1990. An EAW was issued in 2005 for an alleged offence committed 15 years before the EAW came into effect, an excellent example of the evils of retroactive law. The case was dropped 5 years later.

 

In recent weeks we have the case of a retired criminal court Judge being served with an EAW, together with his son and  two business colleagues for an alleged Mafia-related money laundering racket in Italy. The Judge promptly had a stroke and escaped the warrant, but the others have been carted off to spend the next 18 months awaiting trial in Rome’s most notorious jail under one of the worst criminal jurisdictions in Europe.

 

So go to it, Dave.  Let it not be another of your pie-crust promises.