Extradition

Lord Goldsmith of Richmond Park Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Zac Goldsmith (Richmond Park) (Con)]

Thank you very much, Mr Rosindell, for allowing me to sneak in at the last minute. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) on securing the debate. He mentioned the well-known case of Gary McKinnon, and I want briefly to add my support to his cause.

That case, and some of the figures we have heard in the debate, show that we exist in an imbalanced relationship with the United States. That is reinforced by the fact that the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister were so reassuring on this case while in opposition, but now seem to feel at least that they do not have the power or the authority to follow through with some of those reassurances. That has to be addressed.

I am here to speak about a case that has already been mentioned briefly—that of a constituent of mine, Deborah Dark. She was arrested in 1988 in France, on suspicion of drug-related offences, and held in custody for eight and a half months. She was eventually found not guilty by a French court, and was released and returned to the UK, where she tried to get over the fact that she had wasted eight and a half months in jail.

Nearly 20 years later, in 2007, Deborah travelled to Turkey for a holiday, but instead of being able to enjoy it, as she would have expected, she found herself stripped at gunpoint at the airport by Turkish police. According to the police—whose behaviour, incidentally, was unspeakably disgusting and life-changingly appalling—they were acting merely on a tip-off from Interpol. That was the only explanation she was given; they did not elaborate in any way.

As we would expect, Deborah wanted an immediate explanation when she arrived in the UK. She called the police and was told there was no outstanding arrest warrant; they shrugged their shoulders. She asked the Serious Organised Crime Agency and was told it had no records on her either. Helpfully, it added that her arrest might have been a mistake.

Time passed and, with extraordinary calm, Deborah accepted that explanation. Then, in 2008, she travelled to Spain to visit her father, who had retired there and who was unwell. She tried to return to the UK after her holiday, which lasted a few weeks, but she was arrested at the airport. She was taken into custody by the Spanish authorities and told that she faced extradition to France.

That is when the penny began to drop. Seventeen years before, the French prosecutor had appealed the verdict clearing Deborah. That happened without her knowledge. She had been found guilty, without anyone bothering to tell her. In her absence, she was sentenced to six years. I repeat that she was never summoned to appear in court, never asked to defend herself and never given an opportunity to do so. She was never told that her acquittal had been overturned; these things happened entirely without her knowledge.

That was in 1989. More than a decade later, the French authorities issued their European arrest warrant, meaning that EU member states were compelled to arrest Deborah and send her to France to serve the sentence. As it happens, she refused to consent to the extradition and was granted an extradition hearing. Fortunately, the Spanish court chose not to extradite her, on the basis that so much time had passed and she was unlikely to get a thorough, proper or fair trial. After one month in custody, she was released from prison, and she returned home. However, it was not over.

When Deborah arrived in the UK, she was arrested by the British police at Gatwick airport. Again, she refused to consent to extradition, and she was released on bail, pending another hearing. In 2008, extradition was again refused, for the same reason—the passage of time.

Despite being cleared by two courts, however, Deborah remained subject to the European arrest warrant in other EU states until 2010, when the French finally withdrew it. Until that moment, she was, in effect, trapped in the UK and unable to visit her family in Spain for more than three years, all because of a conviction that she was never allowed to contest.

I have chosen to speak about Deborah not only because her case is horrific and she is my constituent, but because there are hundreds of examples of the European arrest warrant failing. Julian Assange, the boss and founder of WikiLeaks, is a well-known figure. He faces extradition to Sweden, despite the fact that he has not been charged anywhere or for anything, and despite the fact that the extradition is being demanded by a private prosecutor, described as a partisan prosecutor—in other words, they are not a member of the national judiciary or a formal representative of the state.

The system clearly needs changing, and it needs changing soon, because the number of such cases is rising. One thousand people were subjected to the European arrest warrant last year, and the figure grows every month. A remedy suggested by Fair Trials International would involve applying the principle of mutual recognition to the European arrest warrant. That would mean that once one member state had refused to execute a European arrest warrant, as happened with Deborah, it would automatically be withdrawn, along with any alerts on EU and international police databases. That remedy would have prevented Deborah from being subjected to her grim groundhog-day experience.

One alternative that has been proposed—including, I believe, by Fair Trials International—is that we raise the bar to capture only the most serious cases, and I certainly go along with that. As my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton said, that is what this tool was originally designed for. I am sure there are alternatives, but I am no expert, and it is for the Government to identify the most appropriate steps. What is certain, however, is that the system needs radical and rapid reform to prevent such appalling abuses from happening again.