Against extradition

Last month Christopher Tappin, an elderly British businessman, was accused of selling batteries for use in Iranian missiles. He was then extradited to the US and incarcerated in a high security prison in the New Mexico desert. Denied bail, he remains there today, awaiting trial as his family wages a campaign for Britain to intervene. It hasn't.  The government’s response to the case, or lack thereof, is seen by many as symptomatic of Britain’s relationship with the US—meekly doing the bidding of our masters across the pond.

The government finds itself on the horns of an increasingly difficult dilemma over extradition, in particular to the US. And as Mr Tappin’s case unfolds, the weeks ahead are likely to add more fuel to the growing fire of public indignation.

There are two villains in this piece.  The first, and in theory the easiest to fix, is the law itself. The Extradition Act 2003 was passed in the wake of 9/11 to speed up the deportation of terrorists wanted by the US. It was a commendable attempt to modernise a rigid and outdated system in which cases routinely took years to wend their way through the courts. However, the new law arguably offered few protections to British citizens threatened with extradition and imprisonment overseas. In many circumstances, the requesting country did not even have to provide any evidence of a crime.



The government now claims to be re-evaluating the law. Meanwhile, campaigners against the Act have come up with their own ideas. They want to see the re-imposition of the requirement for evidence in support of extradition requests. They want to give British judges the discretion to refuse extradition if a case might be better heard on home soil—a protection many other countries take for granted.

Of course, the other villain is America itself, or at least a small proportion of its prosecutors. Herein lies the British government’s greatest problem—it doesn’t have the power to curb US prosecutors’ routinely aggressive, extraterritorial approach to their jurisdiction. Thus, it remains in prosecutors’ power to criminalise the conduct of people who may never have set foot on US soil.

US prosecutors are further encouraged by the lack of a requirement to produce prima facie evidence in support of their requests. Yet once an extradited British citizen is safely incarcerated, his guilt is almost a statistical certainty, the merits of the case notwithstanding. And defendants are aware of this. Around 98 per cent of people charged in the US elect to enter into plea bargains rather than go to trial and face the eye-watering expenses and sentencing penalties that go with it. As a consequence, the US incarcerates more people than any other country, holding 25 per cent of the world's prisoners and only 5 per cent of the world's population.

Proponents of the current arrangements claim the US turns down fewer requests for extradition than Britain. But a closer look at the statistics shows this not to be the case:  there are five times as many British citizens being extradited to the US as there are US citizens being extradited to Britain, according to the Home Office. In other words, the UK uses the extradition arrangements to seek the return of its own citizens who have fled abroad. The US, by contrast, frequently seeks to extradite UK citizens who may never have committed a crime there.

It remains to be seen whether the coalition will honour the strong promises made when faced with pressure to change the law, or if they will bow to the pressures of realpolitik. If the boot were on the other foot, and US politicians were given the chance to stand up for their citizens, the outcome would be in little doubt—our "special relationship" would give way to US interests.

David Bermingham is one of the “NatWest Three” extradited to the US in 2006 under the Extradition Act 2003.  Convicted of wire fraud involving Enron’s CFO Andrew Fastow, Bermingham and his colleagues served 37 month sentences in US and British prisons. They were released in August 2010.



Bermingham’s book, A Price to Pay, is published this month by Gibson Square Books: www.apricetopay.co.uk . All author’s profits will be divided between Liberty and Fair Trials International.