Do police and prosecutors, including in the UK, owe their first loyalty to their own people or to their own supranational brotherhood?
Since UK Column last interviewed Trevor Kitchen, he continues to reside in Portugal, which has judicially decided not to extradite the Swiss bank corruption whistleblower to Zurich. If he were to enter another Schengen country he would be extradited to Switzerland, which is nominally outside the European Union but is one of four countries that form part of the people movement area through the Association Agreement. He has now been in limbo in Portugal for two years, and by his account Swiss intimidation is being used as a primitive backroom tactic to suppress and stifle his critical thinking. He cannot fly directly to the UK as his British passport has been suspended.
What is EAW?
In this follow-up interview, Trevor focuses on the European Arrest Warrant – a commitment between governments, both within and outside the EU, to treat each other’s arrests, detentions, prosecutions, evidence, criminal procedures, suspect interrogations and court standards as equivalent to their own, and therefore by definition reliable, even when there are fundamental differences between the procedural and substantive criminal laws of the two member states.
Member states have so much trust in each other's sincerity that New Term: “Surrender”was used instead of the term “rendition” to describe the rapid transfer of detainees from one side to the other (including from the UK to continental Europe). Even Chinese dissidents This fundamental claim underlying the EAW is patently nonsense.He made a particular comparison between the UK and Germany, where the Minister of the Interior speaks in the Bundestag and the government. Reversing the burden of proof In the area of administrative law, the Swiss have enacted laws to make it easier to remove politically undesirable officials. Trevor Kitchen's Chinese wife calls Swiss hypocrisy and European double standards “worse than the Cultural Revolution”.
Trevor Kitchen describes the EAW as a weapon to silence and suppress public speech, opinion and expression, and points out, with good reason, that it is currently disproportionately used by state prosecutors as a preferred tool rather than a last resort. Prosecutors are currently: de facto They are EU trained, not Member State trained, but “robotically” trained, mainly on computer spreadsheets. England and Wales do not even have the cadre of state prosecutors that Napoleon imposed on the Continent. 1986.
MPs have no interest in pursuing wrongdoing, despite their clear role of oversight over the other branches of government. Brian Gerrish, from his long experience, suggests this is a silence born of discomfort with known wrongdoing, reminding his audience of the detailed investigations of the late Christopher Storey. The European Union: an enemy of its member states; Dutch whistleblower Roelly PostA book documenting the EU's complicity in child theft. Romania, For Export Only: The Untold Story of Romanian Orphansand the Foreign Office's propaganda campaign to win remaining in the EEC in the 1975 referendum is best summarised by veteran archivist Dave Barnby: The EU, a Corporatist Scam: How the EU was created by and for global corporatism.
Trevor Kitchen points out that there are exceptions to the reflexive issuance of European Arrest Warrants by a new generation of computer-trained prosecutors in Brussels. The system prevents prosecutors from issuing European Arrest Warrants against bankers or lawyers. When it comes to journalists, such leniency is not encouraged.
Why is the UK involved?
As UK Home Secretary, Theresa May specifically lobbied for the UK to continue voluntarily joining the EAW, despite the UK first withdrawing from the EU’s security and justice sectors (in 2014) and subsequently Dominic Raab, one of the most senior government ministers of the past decade, to leave the EU. Pointed out in 2014 How many British lives have been destroyed by the issuance of the EAW.
This is because the ministries that oversee each country's prosecutors, police, and courts (all of which are part of the federal constitution) Executive Government officials consider their loyalty to “colleagues” in other countries to take precedence over their obligations under the Constitution of their own country. The expediency of legality takes precedence over the obligations of legality.
State prosecutors in the UK, Switzerland and even the US are enthusiastically involved in EUROJUST in The Hague, and are mutually indebted to each other for the common purpose of working together to achieve politically set prosecutorial goals. The same goes for EUROJUST police detectives. The equivalent of the increasingly criticized police Across the road, Europol.
Treaties concluded between the executive authorities of each country can be enforced by those executive authorities (including the UK government) before the courts and parliaments of each country. Fait accompliDespite clear court decisions (Attorney General v. De Keysers Royal Hotel Ltd In 1920; R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union The 2017 UK Constitution provides that treaties signed under the executive Royal Prerogative cannot change common law or UK statutory law.
What is the problem?
In just over an hour, Trevor Kitchen systematically exposes the myth that European police and justice systems are equally trustworthy. Habeas CorpusMany (but not all) of the continent's countries allow untried prisoners, especially those with hostile relations with politicians and financiers, to remain in prison for years. In many of these countries, prosecutors – politically-driven officials of the executive branch – act as inquisitors (judges) until the moment of trial, and the judicial branch has little or no involvement in the continued detention of unconvicted suspects for years.
Trevor particularly notes that because most of the continent's countries treat defamation as a criminal offense, it is very easy to make those who tell inconvenient truths disappear. In particular, state prosecutors, some of whom are party-appointed, can detain enemies of the state for minor offenses like traffic violations, and then slap them with more serious charges and detain them longer and longer. These more serious charges can be handed over to the detainees for extradition, even though prosecutors in both countries know that the more serious charges will be dropped before the case goes to court. Peter Hofschlof A common tactic in Austria is to maliciously misinterpret calmly written letters of complaint as harassment or intimidation of judicial officials.
Opponents of the European Arrest Warrant argue, and rightly so, that in continental Europe detainees are presumed guilty until they can prove their innocence to political actors posing as judges. When victims like Trevor Kitchen complain about being held indefinitely on pending charges related to something the detainee said or wrote, the system (in his case the Dutch judicial system) will insist that they did nothing wrong by following the procedures.
Are the Swiss a paragon of fairness?
Trevor's fellow Swiss bank whistleblower, Rudolf Elmer, 15 months in solitary confinementHe was even forbidden to see his family, Proven By taking his case to England. Brian Keller This is one of many high-profile examples of detainee mistreatment in Swiss prisons. Trevor Kitchen is determined not to become a victim of custodial abuse in Switzerland. Criticism of these specific cases, and more generally of the political and non-judicial nature of state prosecutors, has been echoed by the United Nations and repetition from Council of Europe,and The EU's own courtsHowever, the EU prosecutorial system remains unchanged.
The same week this interview was published, Beobachter Swiss report (German) In Switzerland, as a result of “efficiency” legal reforms made ten years ago, 92% of criminal sentences are handed down by cantonal prosecutors without going through a court, and such penalty notices allow administrative authorities to impose prison sentences of up to six months for even serious offences.
The EU currently has six large computerized systems to control the movements of its citizens, and the UK remains bound by most of these arrangements on a national basis, even for minor (less serious) offences. Mutual Criminal Assistance TreatyThis is rather similar to the UK remaining tied to European military integration through bilateral treaties, which allows the UK government to say with a straight face that the UK is not aligned with the European Union.
Trevor Kitchen, who asked for another interview in the UK column to focus on the purpose of mass immigration, aptly points out that the increasing numbers of people coming to the UK directly from much less free societies has inevitably diluted what citizens, politicians and lawyers understand to be the norms of British freedom. He ends the interview with a quote from a Dutch lawyer:
Citizens need to be aware that they will not have any legal protection whatsoever once the EU member states set eyes on them. Citizens are not aware of the risks involved in travelling within the EU in terms of the lack of protection from EU member states.
EU politicians have given enormous powers to prosecutors and law enforcement agencies, allowing them to imprison people indefinitely without trial, sometimes for up to two years. The Netherlands has held people on extradition charges for more than two years.
Citizens cannot even lodge a due process complaint because malicious arrests do not fall under Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which provides for the right to a fair trial.
Politicians fail to understand that by granting such powers to prosecutors and other civil authorities, they too may one day become victims – and when they do, they are shocked at the extent of these powers, how inhumane the EU criminal justice system is and the burden it places on the shoulders of individuals.
