UK-US Extradition Treaty

The hon. Gentleman is right, and that is why I intervened on the Solicitor-General when he started telling the House that we should not worry about anything, because the United States sent over volumes of material, as if it were doing a pre-2003 Act extradition. That might be true, and I accept that, if that material had been tested on the 1972 Act provisions, the three defendants might still be extradited to the United States. The difference is that there would not be such huge public disquiet about the manner in which it has been carried out. Even though the material was available, the defendants were deprived, in the course of the extradition proceedings, of the opportunity to carry out the pre-2003 Act scrutiny that they could have done previously, even when they took the matter to the High Court on review. The points taken in the Court of Appeal related to the Human Rights Act, and by their very nature were not as extensive, and could not be the same, as if we had provided a balancing exercise to enable that scrutiny to take place.