An Arresting Record

By Derek Bennett

Knock, knock, “Who’s there?”  “Bill”, “Bill who?”, “The old Bill with an EU arrest warrant – you’re nicked!”  This may sound like a joke, but for more than 6,200 people between 2012 and 2013 this scenario was far from funny when they discovered an EU arrest warrant had been issued against them.

On average seventeen British subjects a day were arrested by the British authorities acting on the orders of foreign based courts. Many of these would have been arrested for criminal offences that are not even crimes in the UK.

The European arrest warrant (EAW) is one of the many reasons why the UK should not be a member of the European Union, it represents all that is wrong with UK membership of this antidemocratic club of political elite’s and the fact that the people of the UK have been well and truly abandoned by the British Government and political class that, in between fiddling the books regarding their expenses and for a number of them ending up behind bars, have done everything wrong not only for the nation but also when it comes to dealing with the EU.

The shocking statistics show just how many British subjects have fallen foul of the EAW, which is a crime in itself, were compiled by the National Crime Agency.  To add to the injustice it is British taxpayers who are being left with the £30 million bill for processing the warrants. The cost of injustice does not come cheap.

Before Blair’s Labour Government abandoned the people it was supposed to represent by signing up to the EAW, any foreign courts wanting to arrest a UK subject had to apply through an extradition order with a description of the offence and Provided substantial evidence.  This no longer applies and each and every British subject is now at the mercy of continental courts and can be arrested on the most flimsiest circumstantial evidence.

In July 2009 A young man from London, Andrew Symeou, was arrested on circumstantial evidence, accused of murder based on nothing other than the fact he was close to where this crime took place, and spent 10 months in an appalling Greek jail and four years of torment before being cleared.

The sheer volume of EAW arrests is a record of arrests that no British politician can be proud of.

 This article first appeared in EU Realist and is reproduced with the permission of the editor.