Police and Justice Bill

As the hon. Gentleman knows, I have enormous respect for him—and of course there can be loss in individual extradition cases. Indeed, if people are extradited, there is always loss in some way or another. I respect that, and we must ensure that people are not extradited when there is no due process. What has happened to extradition law over the last 10 years is that we have fast-tracked our extradition process with regard to many countries, not just an individual country, so as to keep pace with the fast track in the movement of people. Old extradition laws increasingly could not keep pace with the amount of extradition that was required—not from the United States, but elsewhere. The fast-track procedure, which I do not particularly enjoy, whereby the prima facie evidence is not exhaustively analysed, is now commonplace, and undoubtedly would have been put into place in respect of the United States of America. There is no doubt about that. As far as the United States was concerned, we would have precisely the same burden as we have in any event; the difficulty lies in reciprocity. The Americans—as may be their right, as they have said—could not, or would not, sign up to a treaty because of their constitutional inhibitions. The answer is that we are no worse off than we would have been, and they, arguably, may be a little better off. In those circumstances, I find it difficult to make myself part of the rewriting—effectively the wrecking—of a treaty, when it appears to me that there is, in truth, no loss, in the macro rather than the micro sense.