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Not So Special Relationship?
In today's Daily Telegraph, Jeff Randall wonders if Britain is getting a poor deal from its special relationship with the US - in legal terms, at least.
Three British financiers - the "NatWest three" - are to be extradited the United States to face charges of defrauding a British bank to the tune of £3 million. David Bermingham, Gary Mulgrew and Giles Derby aren't being charged in Britain, where the alleged offences took place. However, an inquiry related to the US Enron scandal filed to have the men extradited to the US, in the hope that they might plea bargain and implicate more important figures in the enquiry. However, another character in the US turned supergrass and implicated "dozens who were suspected of foul play, including the three Britons with a cameo role."
The three were duly lined up for extradition, and in May, home secretary Charles Clarke approved their extradition to face seven counts of wire fraud in Texas.
The three still hope to challenge Clarke's order, possibly taking it to the European Court of Human Rights. Randall adds that they may be imprisoned while awaiting extradition.
Though the men's alleged crime has nothing to do with terrorism, the three are being extradited on the terms of a treaty signed by Britain after 9/11. The treaty makes it easier for British based suspects to be extradited to the US to face trial in connection with terror charges.
Seems, on the face of it, a decent agreement between two allies fighting the same battle. Except it isn't an agreement. The US did not sign its part of the agreement with Britain - Randall cites "opposition from the Irish-American lobby, some of whom were terrified that ratification by the US would lead to the extradition of suspected IRA terrorists to the UK...
"...the extended arm of US law reaches all the way to London, but Britain has no reciprocal rights in America."
Moreover, the agreement (such as), was designed to deal with terrorist suspects who pose a threat to life on an international scale. Why is it being applied to white collar criminals? What threat does it pose to future agreements between American and British businesses?
Indeed, Britain is the only EU country to have such an agreement with the US:
"No other EU country is so willing to strip away the protection of citizenship. No other EU government trades its people so cheaply. As waves of immigrants pour into Britain, many with no legal right to be here (yet knowing that they will never be thrown out), new arrivals must be baffled by the contrast between the hospitality they receive and the rough justice meted out to some of those who were born and bred under a Union Flag....
"While Afghan hijackers are permitted to stay in Britain, on benefits, because it's "unsafe" to send them back, and the Somali wanted in connection with the murder of PC Sharon Beshenivsky wasn't deported before her killing because Somalia is a hell-hole, Bermingham, who served in the British Army for five years, rising to the rank of captain, is packed off to a high-security US jail.
"American authorities have not yet produced a scrap of evidence to support his prosecution. They won't have to. They simply said: "Hand him over". And we will. It's disgusting," Randall concludes, "British justice is meant to be blind, not lobotomised and castrated by a foreign power."
