February 2021 infringements package: key decisions — EUbusiness com | EU news, business and politics eubusiness.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eubusiness.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
George Hepburne-Scott
Prior to our departure by far the highest volume of extradition cases were through the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) scheme. The UK-EU Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) was signed on the 24 December 2020 and came into force at 11:01pm on 31 December 2020. Among other things, the TCA created a new extradition warrant called simply the Arrest Warrant (AW).
The AW surrender arrangements are contained in Title VII of Part 3 in the TCA.
Legislatively, as incorporated into the Extradition Act 2003 (the 2003 Act) by the European Union (Future Relationship) Act 2020 (the 2020 Act), the new AW scheme is largely consistent with that operated under the EAW scheme and averted the need to fall back on the 1957 Convention on Extradition.
The applicants, who had all been arrested pursuant to European Arrest Warrants (EAWs) before 31 December 2020, failed in their applications for writs of habeas corpus. Their applications had been made on a single common ground: that, since 11 pm on 31 December 2020, the end of the transition period defined by the Agreement on the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU and Euratom, there was no longer any legal basis in international law for their surrender; and that in consequence there was no basis in domestic law for continued detention or for the maintenance of bail conditions. In dismissing their applications, the Administrative Court held, among other things, that the argument in support of the applications was misconceived: as a matter of constitutional principle, the correct starting point for the legal analysis was the Act of Parliament which governed extradition, namely the Extradition Act 2003 and the domestic law which modified it, not Framework Decision 2002/584 JHA