Suitably lopsided. Image: Ben Sutherland
The verb usage in the headline is hardly elegant but neatly fits the case of Richard O'Dwyer, the Sheffield student who has become the latest Briton to face extradition to the US in highly questionable circumstances.
All judicial systems have flaws.
France rightly refuses to send people to the US for trials in which they would be virtually certain to be treated much more harshly than at home.
But there are plenty of instances of the French getting things grotesquely wrong, too: from false but ruinous child abuse accusations, leaving the innocent and unconvicted to fester in jail for months on end, to the absurd four-year sentence passed on a Scottish woman, Margaret MacDonald, for running an upmarket prostitution racket. It sounded very much like a victimless crime.
And these cases can be contrasted with laughably lenient handling of people who kill others, often when drunk and/or reckless, on the roads of France, and the indulgence shown towards corrupt public figures.
Come back across the Channel and you find much cause for both praise and disapproval. The British courts have got cases dreadfully wrong, as in some of the IRA show trials, but at least they have then made amends, albeit far too long after the event.
Then you consider how British lawyers and judges use or enforce our disgraceful, oppressive defamation laws to suppress freedom of expression, exploiting or presiding over a rotten system that allows foreign opportunists to breeze in and collect huge windfalls denied to them in their own jurisdictions.
Nick Cohen has written convincingly on the subject in a new book, You Can't Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom*, a long extract from which appeared in The Observer yesterday.
Even more despicable than the examples of libel tourism that Cohen describes, or one or two others I could add, is the acquiescence of our courts in attempts by the US authorities to seize British citizens for crimes allegedly committed on UK soil but also (or perhaps even only) constituting offences in America.
O'Dwyer's threatened extradition is such a case. He is being pursued for running a website, TVshack, which listed other sites where people could gain free access to films and television shows. If reporting of the extradition proceedings is accurate, what he did was not even against the law of the UK.
People with sharp legal brains read Salut!. Maybe one of them can explain a process that allows such gross breaches of natural justice to occur.
District Judge Quentin Purdy, sitting at Westminster magistrates' court, made this astonishing ruling when allowing O'Dwyer's extradition to go ahead: "There are said to be direct consequences of criminal activity by Richard O'Dwyer in the USA albeit by him never leaving the north of England. Such a state of affairs does not demand a trial here if the competent UK authorities decline to act and does, in my judgment, permit one in the USA."
It may be that O'Dwyer, like the hacker Gary McKinnon, also facing extradition to the US thanks to the kowtowing of British courts, is no saint.
McKinnon hacked into Nasa and Pentagon computers from his London home. He admits causing breaching the systems (his explanation, according to reports, is that he wanted to find out whether "little green men": exist), but not responsibility for damage said to have been caused.
In turn, O'Dwyer reportedly earned a great deal of money from his site. On the face of it, then, neither has behaved in a manner that would make reasonable men and women admire him. Just as computer hackers are pests, O'Dwyer does not appear to have been driven by altruistic concern that people were being deprived of filmed entertainment.
But if they have committed criminal offences at all, they should be put on trial in the country where they did so, namely Britain, and punished - if convicted - under our laws. What is entirely sure is that in such an eventuality, O'Dwyer would not run the least risk of being jailed for 10 years or McKinnon for 60.
I do not suggest that these maximum sentences would be applied in either case and nor would I argue that a Briton who commits an offence in another jurisdiction should avoid being prosecuted there, however strongly I may deplore the outcome.
But I do submit with all the force at my disposal that no British subject should ever be sent for trial in another country, especially one that is likely to impose disproportionate penalties, for acts allegedly committed in his or her own land but somehow deemed criminally actionable elsewhere. Ignorance of the law is famously no defence; do we now need to be fully conversant with the laws of foreigners whether or not we have any wish to visit their countries?
If the British authorities have examined the cases of these young men and found no justification for bringing charges, that should be an end to the matter.
As for the punishment hawks of the US, they should be told to content themselves with the knowledge that such individuals will - in common with Roman Polanski, safely back in France after his narrow escape from being carted off to a Californian jail from Switzerland and whose case I have previously shown to touch on arguments about both libel tourism and extradition - forever be denied the chance of visiting Walt Disney World, Hollywood or Manhattan without fear of arrest.
And at the risk of being considered deeply unfashionable, I heartily applaud the Daily Mail for its vociferous campaigning on the troubling matters raised by the two cases I have highlighted.
* You can buy Nick Cohen's book, which is published by 4th Estate, for about £8 by visiting Salut!'s Amazon link.
Recent Comments