51st State? [purplecthulhu]

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Seems that there will soon be a summary extradition system that could extradite UK citizens to the US, possibly to face the death penalty, with no regard for the facts of the case.

Find out more here:

http://www.livejournal.com/community/anonymousclaire/227564.html#cutid1

I would remind you that the US has a remarkably variable justice system, with evidence of significant racial bias in some areas.

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There are 9 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

If this is true (and I see no evidence that it is, nor any that it isn't), then this is one case where I certainly agree with you. The United States is not a safe nation to extradite people too, certainly not if lacking propper evidence.

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To whom should we write?

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Blunkett... One's MP?

This hasn't appeared on Liberty's web pages yet, and I'm still looking for confirmation beyond the cited article in New Statesman.

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I don't trust our European allies to give our citizens fair trials either ...

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A reasonable point - I have some issues with the Napoleonic system of justice myself. However, the argument is that European countries and the UK are operating under the same basic bill of rights, so there is some comparability for intra-European extradition. This is not the case with the US (they still have the death penalty for example), so its inclusion is inconsistant as well as worrying.

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I agree that we're supposed to be operating under the same bill of rights, but I'm not completely convinced that we are.

Here is a report from Fair Trials Abroad. They list Greece, Spain and Portugal as bad places to be tried in, and they conclude

The cases [that they talk about] demonstrate that there exist in some countries in the European Union a number of junior judges who are for one reason or another incapable of giving fair trials to foreigners.

So I would go further than you and say that we should only negotiate bilateral agreements with EU countries that we trust to give our citizens just trials, or that we need to have extradition treaties with. For instance, I don't trust the Spanish courts, but we need to have an extradition treaty because otherwise British citizens will flee there after committing crimes, and we won't be able to get them back.

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Hey, no butting in. We were 51st first. (Say that 3 times fast.)

What would concern me most about this is that the US has already demonstrated that they have no problem holding people without giving them access to legal council or even properly processing them if it meets the paranoid requirements du jour.

So you might arrive and disappear.

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The European Union prohibits its members from extraditing EU citizens to countries where they may face the death penalty - the receiving country has to guarantee that the death penalty will not be sought before extradition can proceed. The EU is abolitionist, and the chances of it changing its stance on this are extremely remote.

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I thought a principle along these lines did operate, however, I don't trust the current US administration, and John Ashcroft in particular, to play straight with this, especially for terrorist offences. Tricks could easily be played with additional captial charges being brought once a suspect is extradited, for example.

The US is traditionally very reluctant to be dictacted to by foreign governments, and the present administration even more so.

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purplecthulhu

51st State?

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December