The government has decided, apparently without any form of democratic consultation at all, that we should opt back in to the European Arrest Warrant which we were previously opted out of.
This wonderful piece of legislation completely overrides the centuries-old principle that an accuser must show at least some form of case to an independent judicial authority before you are shipped off to face trial elsewhere.
They simply have to issue it and that is the end of it.
There is no challenge or ability to do anything about it whatsoever in the UK.
This was originally wheeled out on the basis that it was needed to counter the most serious of crimes.
Obviously a particularly serious one was the luckless family who decided the NHS couldn’t treat their child and went to Spain with him for treatment there. They clearly needed to be arrested immediately and the UK authorities issued a European Arrest Warrant against them resulting in the parents being locked up in Spain and their children put into care.
Fortunately the media got hold of it and it was eventually overturned but it is quite clear that bureaucrats will use it at the drop of a hat – not against only serious criminals at all – and the government has sold us down the river on this so we have no protection at all.
One of the worst examples of this was a luckless young British man who was the victim of a mistaken identity when on holiday in Greece when somebody was been badly hurt in a fight.
A European arrest warrant was issued against him and having been removed from England to Greece he then spent over 3 years in jail in Greece before his case came before the court where it was (unsurprisingly) dismissed.
To spend 3 years in jail over here you would have to have been sentenced to something like 6 years or more – unbelievable that an innocent man served such a sentence.
If this is the sort of protection we can expect from the government then I think I can manage without it.
Quite how anybody could get themselves into that situation the first place is beyond me but then having got out to go back into it beggars belief.
MPs recently worked themselves into a lather about extending pre-trial detention in the UK to 42 days which they thought was too long but they seem to accept that having the people they represent carted off to distant places and held almost indefinitely without hope of bail in countries where the legal system is wildly different to ours is quite OK
It runs contrary to everything I ever understood the British legal system stood for but is yet another mark of how much of our basic freedoms have been removed or undermined without any publicity at all and for reasons which are completely incomprehensible.
Geoff Ormrod
ormrodslaw 