ARRESTED AND HELD IN BRITAIN ON DEMAND OF EU PROSECUTORS

Edmond Arapi

THE SUNDAY TELEGRAPH - ANDREW GILLIGAN

Under the European Arrest Warrant, people can be held and extradited over a charge that is not even a crime in this country, as Andrew Gilligan explains.

Here at Extradition Central, the court that handles all cases for the entire country, it is clear that extradition, like other forms of travel, has gone mass-market. 

All this has come about as a result of the European Arrest Warrant (EAW), which can be issued against any person by the prosecuting authorities of any EU country. It requires the police and courts of another EU state to deliver up that person, with few questions asked.

Edmond Arapi, a Staffordshire waiter, was seized under an EAW issued by Italy after being sentenced to 16 years in absentia for a murder in Genoa in 2004. Yet he never left Britain in 2004. He spent time in Wandsworth prison before the Italians finally admitted it was a case of mistaken identity.

Even in more routine cases, the charity Fair Trials International [FTI], hears many complaints that defendants do not get their rights to proper translation or legal help and are left adrift in courts whose rules they do not know and language they cannot understand. Foreigners, as a flight risk, are often refused bail and pretrial detention in some European jurisdictions can last years.

"The Pandora's box is this thing called mutual recognition," says Catherine Heard, FTI's policy officer. "It's a belief that a fair trial can be achieved in many different systems, so why don't we just recognise each other's judicial decisions? That was the thinking in the 1990s, but then came 9/11 and a lot of the defence safeguards were forgotten."