UK executed more European Arrest Warrants than any EU country for four years in a row

Britain carried out more than eight times as many European Arrest Warrants than were executed on its behalf by EU police forces in the last decade and arrested more suspects than any other EU country for four years in a row.

Tory MPs said that the “justice deficit” meant the EU should drop demands in Brexit negotiations over a new extradition treaty for a role for the European Court of Justice (ECJ) and a UK pledge to stay in the European Convention on Human Rights.

The UK will leave the European Arrest Warrant system (EAW) at the end of the Brexit transition period on December 31. British and EU negotiators will resume talks over a replacement treaty when trade negotiations resume in London on Monday.

“Since the European Arrest Warrant came into force in the UK, we have surrendered over 10,000 individuals to face trial or serve sentences in EU Member States,” a Home Office spokesperson said.

“That is why we are seeking fast track extradition arrangements based on the EU’s existing agreement with [non-EU countries] Norway and Iceland.”

“I can tell you we are not far from an agreement but we have some fundamental problems for the operationality and implementation of this objective because in some areas we need a clear reference to the Court of Justice,” Michel Barnier told the Sunday Telegraph.

“When the interpretation of the EU law is concerned, we must and we will refer to the Court of Justice,” the EU’s chief negotiator said.

“The EU is going to have to swallow its pride on this one. Quite clearly the UK contribution to the EAW system is considerably more than any of the EU member states,” said David Jones, a former minister at the Department for Exiting the European Union.

“It does highlight how important the UK is to the system of criminal law enforcement in the EU. So it is clearly in Brussels’ interest to replicate the EAW with something that doesn’t require ECJ oversight,” the MP for Clwyd West said.

British negotiators are also seeking additional safeguards in the new treaty, which are not part of the EAW agreement. These include giving judges the power to refuse EU extradition requests if there had not yet been a decision to charge or try the wanted suspect to prevent long periods of pre-trial detention or if the UK courts think the cost of an arrest outweighs the seriousness of the offence.

Failure to agree a replacement deal by January 1 will mean the UK falls back on 1956 rules for extradition which are far slower.

During the financial years 2009-2020, 16,300 people were arrested in the UK on behalf of authorities in EU countries. 11,461, 391 of them British nationals, were ultimately extradited.

Over the same period 1,956 were arrested by EU forces carrying out UK-issued warrants, according to British figures. 1,674, including 728 British suspects, were surrendered to the UK.

European Commission analysis published this week found that British police arrested 1,294 suspects under the streamlined extradition system in 2018, which is the latest year for which comparative date is available.

No other EU country executed as many warrants. Spain arrested 1,022 suspects, France 572, the Netherlands 746, Romania 719, Italy 435 , Poland 368, Bulgaria 278 and Malta just 10. The UK also arrested more suspects than any of the remaining 27 member states in  2017, 2016 and 2015.

In 2018, 873 suspects were extradited from Britain, a figure only beaten by Germany, which surrendered 1,240 suspects. Berlin has not submitted numbers for how many EAWs it carried out for the last four years to Brussels.

The UK issued 176 warrants in 2018 and 185 suspects were extradited to the UK that year. Germany issued 3,783 warrants over the same period.

114 of the offences, the majority, were for theft or criminal damage but they also included including human trafficking, firearms, drugs and sexual offences and crimes resulting in deaths.

The EAW replaced bilateral extradition agreements between EU countries with a much faster streamlined system that involved the judiciary directly rather than politicians. It was agreed, with British support, two months after 9/11. Brexiteers later argued that carrying out arrests on the orders of foreign magistrates was an affront to national sovereignty.

The EAW made it easier to extradite suspects from EU countries that have constitutions forbidding the surrender of their nationals such as Germany and Austria.

Those countries, and Slovenia, said they would not extradite suspects to Britain during the transition period because it was legally no longer an EU member state after Brexit on January 31.

The UK wants countries who refuse to extradite their citizens to non-EU countries on constitutional grounds to commit to enforcing a sentence or prosecute a case themselves.