Sir, –Sir Hugh Orde predictably laments the potential loss of the European arrest warrant, which makes it nice and easy for the police to have people arrested and extradited across the EU but with little real control over its use ("Return of Border controls after Brexit is inevitable", Opinion & Analysis, May 31st).
Take the example of my countryman Andrew Symeou. He had no right to appear before a British court to test the quality of evidence against him when a Greek court issued such a warrant for his arrest on a charge of murder, despite him pleading his innocence.
Mr Symeou was arrested and extradited to Greece where he spent over a year in jail on remand. When he finally arrived in court, the judge rightly dismissed the case against him because there wasn’t a pick of evidence beyond a questionable eyewitness. There was not a penny in compensation or even an apology for what was an extremely damaging episode for him.
The dangerous part of the system is that to make it work we have to pretend under the European arrest warrant rules that all EU countries have legal systems of similar quality. That may be true of Ireland, Sweden, Holland and Germany and the UK, but it certainly is not true of Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and others, and it is patent nonsense to say otherwise. Even in the UK, the record of the police for carrying out fair, honest and objective investigations is not, I hardly need to point out, entirely 100 per cent.
Legal hurdles are there for a reason. It is to stop the likes of the police abusing the powers they already have. Doing away with those hurdles is a recipe for disaster for someone. There is no reason that an independent UK cannot negotiate a streamlined extradition system with various countries. Neither will it be impossible to opt in to the various criminal intelligence-sharing schemes Sir Hugh seeks the UK to be involved in, if our democratically elected representatives specifically choose to do so. That way we can sack them if they get it wrong. The UK is an global intelligence superpower, and nobody is going to refuse to work with us if we leave the EU. We have resources and expertise that few other nations in the world have, and it will be deployed where our duly elected government see fit and should be subject to judicial scrutiny. If Sir Hugh finds that a tad inconvenient, that is just too bad. – Yours, etc,
TONY J HOMEWOOD,
Wakefield.