European arrest warrants  - Extradition rules need reforming

It isn’t necessary to be a eurosceptic on steroids to have concerns about the European arrest warrant (EAW) system, currently being used — and abused — by Spain’s government to get its Catalan dissidents back from Germany and Britain. Even the European Parliament voiced disquiet about what it described, back in 2014, as the system’s “imperfections”.

Few would argue that effective international extradition procedures are undesirable, since the only frontiers criminals such as child sex offenders, drug dealers and terrorists recognise are those behind which they can shelter. The EAW is a necessary device that can assist police forces in bringing people suspected of serious crimes to justice. It is simple and speedy. Extradition took an average of one year before the system was introduced; that has been cut to 48 days. But, as civil rights lawyers have repeatedly pointed out, it has flaws that have resulted in numerous cases of serious injustice.

There are three main areas of concern: governments issuing the warrants for extradition are not required to provide prima facie evidence that there’s a case to be answered; alleged offenders have been extradited on the flimsiest of

evidence to jurisdictions where they face excessive periods in prison before trial — bail being difficult to get as a foreign suspect — and eventual acquittal; and warrants are used by authorities — most notably in Eastern Europe — to pursue people wanted for relatively minor crimes, generating disproportionate financial costs and unduly severe consequences for people accused of trivial offences.

The number of EAWs issued each year has risen inexorably — from 6,894 in 2005 to more than 16,000 in 2015. Poland stands out not only as one of the leading exporters of extradition requests but also as the member state most prepared to waste money pursuing fugitives wanted for crimes that could not by any measure be rated as serious. Alleged offences for which it has issued warrants include the reckless riding of a pedal cycle, pig rustling, receiving a stolen telephone, exceeding a credit card limit, and thefts of wardrobe doors, a wheelbarrow and tools worth €52, and a teddy bear. Romania is not averse to using EAWs to chase people whose only crime was to publicise corruption. The cost of responding to the warrants, estimated at an average of €25,000 per case, is borne by the police, prison and court services in other member states.

Spain’s abuse of the system for transparently political purposes has highlighted the lack of adequate safeguards in the EAW treaty, which was constructed on the more than somewhat naive notion that judicial systems in all member states were, regardless of varying legal codes, equivalent in the care they took to ensure trials were fair and not unduly delayed, and that courts were independent of government influence or control. This optimism was misplaced.

The Brussels Commission has been reluctant to propose robust safeguards that would ensure that, while we have justice without borders, we also have a community in which citizens are not subject to arbitrary arrest and extradition, and resources are not wasted on the continent-wide pursuit of pig rustlers and reckless cyclists.