I have a certain amount of very direct practical experience of conducting extradition proceedings under what is called part 2, which is the part of the Extradition Act 2003 that deals with non-arrest warrant extraditions. Of course, as Lord Advocate I am now responsible for representing requesting states from around the world that want to extradite from the UK and for dealing with our own requests to other countries, with the help of Helen Nisbet and her staff.
Part 2 extraditions are significantly more cumbersome than extraditions using the arrest warrant. I saw somewhere—I do not know precisely what dataset was being looked at—a statement that the average time for the execution of a European arrest warrant is 42 days and the average time for a part 2 extradition is between nine and 10 months, which gives some illustration of the difference.
The reason for that difference in operation is that the arrest warrant is, in effect, built on a system of mutual trust and confidence and is an entirely judicial process, in which if a warrant has been issued by the relevant authority in another member state the working assumption is that that will be executed subject to a set of protections for suspects. With the arrest warrant, we have relative speed and relative simplicity, and in this context speed is important. Justice benefits. People are brought to trial in the right forum within a reasonable time, whether they are acquitted or convicted. There is a very marked practical difference between the two procedures.
The other important practical difference is that the arrest warrant is plugged into the SIS 2 system. It sits alongside the system of alerts, which means that if we issue an arrest warrant for a suspect whom we want for trial in Scotland, they may be picked up very quickly through the operation of the SIS 2 system. A good example of that is Marek Harcar, the man who was accused and ultimately convicted of the murder of Moira Jones. We issued an arrest warrant and, following that, he was picked up very quickly in his home country of Slovakia and ultimately returned for trial. There are alert systems through Interpol, but alerts do not go up on to the system as quickly as they do through the SIS 2 system.
In moving from the current regime under the arrest warrant to an alternative, we are working on the basis that we can fall back on the European Convention on Extradition, which is a treaty arrangement that applies to quite a number of countries that are not in the EU and which sit under part 2 of the Extradition Act 2003. There are some technical issues that will have to be resolved. Some member states, as I understand it, repealed their domestic legislation, which would allow them to rely on the 1957 convention vis-à-vis the UK. That issue will need to be worked through and resolved.
The other difference is that, under the arrest warrant system, member states are obliged to extradite in accordance with the system regardless of whether the person wanted is a national of that country. Outside the arrest warrant system—we see this even in the transition arrangements that are envisaged—a number of countries within the EU will not extradite their own nationals. Germany, for example, has a constitutional bar to extraditing its own nationals, but that is trumped by the arrest warrant.
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I return to Marek Harcar. I understand that Slovakia is a country that will not normally extradite its own nationals, so outside the arrest warrant system a question would have arisen about whether we would have been able to secure the extradition of that individual. One of the concerns is that because the arrest warrant system is relatively speedy and operates according to timetables that are laid down, there is a risk that our extradition requests, if they are made outside that system, will not be treated with the same priority as those that sit within the system. One can see a set of detriments, from a professional criminal justice perspective, if we have to operate outside the arrest warrant system.