Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether the UK may exclude any offences from the scope of the European Convention on Extradition that fall under the scope of the European Arrest Warrant and cannot be moved from that warrant's scope by the UK; and what offences the UK has so excluded.

Article 2(3) of the European Convention on Extradition allows a Contracting Party to exclude offences from the application of the Convention where its domestic law does not allow extradition for those offences. At the time of ratification in May 1991, the UK made two reservations concerning Article 2 of the Convention. One of these reserved the right to refuse extradition if it appears, in relation to the offence(s) in respect of which a person's return is sought, that by reason of its trivial nature, or because the accusation is not made in good faith in the interests of justice, extradition would in all the circumstances be unjust or oppressive. The UK has not made any further reservations or notifications concerning Article 2.

Other Contracting Parties may also exclude offences under Article 2(3), making this a less effective tool than the European Arrest Warrant for returning wanted British criminals to face justice.

Under the Convention, extradition takes longer and is more expensive than surrender under the European Arrest Warrant. It is also less effective as a Contracting Party may also refuse to extradite its own nationals under the Convention, which means that some people may never face justice.
In non-European Arrest Warrant cases, the following EU Member States havean absolute bar on extraditing their own nationals to the UK:

Austria
Belgium
Czech Republic
Finland
France
Germany
Greece
Latvia
Luxembourg
Slovakia
Slovenia
Spain
Sweden

A further nine have made declarations to the European Convention on Extradition to the effect that they will not extradite their own nationals:

Bulgaria
Croatia
Cyprus
Estonia
Hungary
Lithuania
Poland
Portugal
Romania