The Joint Committee on Human Rights concludes that the current statutory framework does not provide effective protection for human rights. The rights most often relevant to extradition are: prohibition of torture; fair trial; liberty and security; private and family life; and prohibition of discrimination. The Committee calls on the Government to spell out detailed safeguards in the statutory framework. Parliament should be asked to commence the "most appropriate forum" safeguard in the Police and Criminal Justice Act 2006 and that a requirement for the requesting country to show a prima facie case or similarly robust evidential threshold should be introduced in extradition cases. The most appropriate forum safeguard would require the judge to consider whether it is in the interests of justice for the individual to be tried in the requesting country - and to refuse the extradition request if it is not. The committee also calls for negotiated changes to the European Arrest Warrant, a review of the provision of legal representation. The committee also concludes that the power of the Secretary of State to refuse extradition to non-EU countries should not be extended. The powers of the judge in an extradition case should instead ensure adequate protection of rights.

Response to 15th report of session 2010-12, HL Paper 156, HC 767 (ISBN 9780108473500). Dated October 2012

This book examines those aspects of the law of extradition which reveal conflicts between different legal systems and where there is a need for an improvement in procedures, either in the interest of mutual legal assistance or for the better protection of the fugitive. The book starts from the assumption that, unless otherwise stated, the principles applied by domestic courts are of universal applicability. Such a broad generalisation is not guaranteed to be right in every circumstance, but it concentrates the study on extradition law itself, rather than on the various national interpretations of domestic extradition laws. The law is stated in accordance with the materials available at 1 December 1990. Most extradition agreements tend to focus on those matters which form the basis for this book. Throughout the discussion of these matters it will be noticed that there is a tension between extradition law as part of a process of mutual assistance by states in the area of criminal justice, and extradition law as a means of protecting the fugitives' rights and freedoms. Dr Geoff Gilbert is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Law and a member of the Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex. Within the H.C.R., he teaches International Criminal Law on the LL.M. in International Human Rights.

This book provides the reader with a detailed and systematic analysis of the current state of UK extradition law. This is also the first book to critically examine the implications of the Human Rights Act. The new edition provides full analysis of recent developments including the Pinochet case.

Three hundred years ago, few people cared about the murky past of new arrivals to the United States, and the countries they had left made few efforts to pursue them to their new home. Today with the growth of bureaucracy, telecommunications, and air travel, extradition has become a full-time business. But the public's knowledge of, and consequent concern about, extradition remains minimal, aroused from time to time by newspaper headlines, only to fade. In this readable and compelling history of extradition in America, Christopher Pyle remedies that ignorance. Using American constitutional law and drawing on a wealth of historical cases, he describes the collision of law and politics that occurs when a foreign country demands the surrender of individuals held to be terrorists by some and freedom fighters by others. He shows how U.S. policymakers have attempted to substitute deportation for extradition, and turn the surrender of a foreign national (or even an American citizen) into a political rather than a judicial process. Beginning with the New England Puritans' refusal to surrender to the "regicides" who had signed the death warrant of King Charles I, he traces the attitudes and ideologies that have shaped American extradition practice, culminating in the efforts by the Reagan and Bush administrations to turn the legal extradition process into an executive tool of state policy. Along the way we meet such legal luminaries as James Madison and John Stuart Mill, William Rehnquist and Oliver North, as well as pirates and fugitive slaves, anarchists and refugees, drug lords and runaway sailors. Woven throughout this story is the author's belief that current developments in extradition law ignore or actually violate the principles of individual liberty, due process, and humanity on which we claim our country was built. As he remarks in the Introduction, "Extradition involves the surrender of human beings--persons under the protection of our Constitution--to foreign regimes, many of which are unjust. This reality was well understood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the United States was a refuge for the victims of European oppression, but it has been disregarded frequently in the twentieth century as we have sought to stem the tide of immigration and develop advantageous economic and political relations with autocratic regimes of every stripe." Author note: Christopher H. Pyle is Professor of Politics at Mount Holyoke College. He is the author of several books and Congressional reports and has frequently testified before Congress on the subject of extradition and deportation.