After seven years and two trips to England’s highest court, U.S. prosecutors this spring hauled English executive Ian Norris before a U.S. court on the charge of obstructing an antitrust investigation. It wasn’t quite the dramatic “first extradition for antitrust” headline that they had originally envisioned. But authorities regard it as a welcome legal vindication of the much-maligned 2003 extradition treaty between the United States and the United Kingdom.
Negotiated soon after 9/11, the treaty was designed for terrorists, but it has been used more for white-collar criminals. Its chief flaw is to remove the requirement that the U.S. show the U.K. probable cause for extradition—without removing the requirement in the opposite direction. Boris Johnson, now mayor of London, complained during a 2006 parliamentary debate that the U.S. can “hoover over to America, as if by some electromagnetic power, people against whom they’re not obliged to produce any prima facie evidence.”
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