Like most people, I do not have the slightest idea whether Christopher Tappin - flown off under Britain's squalid extradition policy to face whatever passes for justice in a Texan court - knowingly agreed to export items intended for Iranian missile systems.
Iran is run by a nasty regime and poses obvious threats to international security. If Tappin is guilty, and he vehemently protests that he believed he was dealing in batteries for Dutch motor manufacturers, he should be punished.
But the evidence should be heard in a British court and the punishment inflicted on this 65-year-old retired businessman, if such examination of the facts leads to conviction, should be imposed by that court. But because it was a US sting operation that put Tappin under suspicion, his trial will take place in Texas.
It is another shameful episode in the disgraceful story of British acquiescence in American desire to put this country's citizens on trial in a jurisdiction that offers them scant protection from ruinously costly and necessarily unjust proceedings.
It is is unthinkable that other European civilisations, and notably France, would dream of shipping off its people to a judicial system that glories in prison sentences measured in decades for offences that would attract nowhere near double figures in domestic courts. Or that confronts a defendant with two years of waiting, once abducted from country of origin, in an expensive environment thousands of miles from home (or in custody if denied or unable to afford bail).
Tappin, who left a sick wife behind when he surrendered to US justice at Heathrow, could be jailed for up to 35 years. His UK supporters say he will be "forced into a plea bargaining position or end his days in an American prison".
The British courts have not had a chance to test the evidence against him. Essentially, they have merely taken the Americans' word for it that they have a case for him to answer and taken absolutely no account of the affront to natural justice involved.
Never forget that had the present legislation - a poisonous part, I am sorry to say, of the Labour government's legacy - been in place 10 years ago, an Algerian living in the UK, Lotfi Raissi, would have been delivered to a vengeful US system on mightily fanciful charges that he was a Sept 11 plotter. He would probably have died in jail but for the opportunity a British district judge then had to look at the evidence and find it glaringly inadequate.
Please read my account - plus readers' comments - on another of the rotten cases of Britons or British residents facing such rough justice: Richard O'Dwyer and sucking up to a justice system - sorry, America - that sucks
At its simplest, no country should be prepared to send its citizens to face prosecution abroad if the consequences will, or may, be graver than would ever apply on its own territory.
The Cameron Government's willingness to do so reeks of eagerness and makes me ashamed of my own country.
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