Extradition

• Author: International Law Group
• Pages: 64-67

Page 64

Noel Heath and Glenroy Matthew (petitioners) are citizens of the Federation of St. Christopher and Nevis (the Federation). The U.S. government (respondent) wants them extradited for trial on serious drug charges. The U.S. charged both petitioners with having conspired to supply and import cocaine into the U.S. - Heath into New York, Matthew into Florida.

The U.S. had requested the petitioners' extradition as far back as May 1996. In June of that year, the Federation's Minister of Foreign Affairs ordered Dr. Haynes Blackman, the senior magistrate of the relevant district at that time, to issue warrants for their arrest. The Extradition Act of 1870 governs extradition in the Federation and it was the magistrate's duty to hear the case in the same manner as if the prisoner were charged with an indictable offence committed in England. If the evidence produced would justify the prisoner's committal for trial, the magistrate is to commit him to prison. If not, he should set him free. After a hearing in August 1996, Dr. Blackman held that both petitioners fell into the latter class.

Although judicial review proceedings in April 1998 led to the quashing of those discharge orders by the High Court the petitioners have been at liberty ever since. The intervening years, however, have seen a whole series of proceedings. Nothing daunted, the petitioners have gone on resisting their extradition by all available means. After a series of drawn out procedural misadventures and corrections, complicated somewhat by the retirement of Magistrate Blackman, the petitioners brought their first appeal to the Privy Council.

They advanced four main contentions. First, they urged that the Minister of Foreign Affairs had no power to issue the requisitions to the magistrate on June 24, 1996. Secondly, they argued that the High Court was itself in error in ruling that the magistrate had taken a wrong approach to the evidence before him. (In particular this involved a holding that the transcripts of certain tape-recorded telephone conversations, apparently implicating the petitioners in the alleged drug offenses, were inadmissible in the extradition proceedings).

Their third point was that section 14 of the Federation's Constitution barred the United States' judicial review challenge to the magistrate's original discharge orders made under section 10 of the 1870 Act. Finally, petitioners complained that there had been such a long delay in the case as to amount to oppression and an abuse of process.

Having considered and rejected each of those submissions, the Board advised Her Majesty to dismiss the appeal and to remit the case to the High Court. Following the Board'sPage 65 order of June 26, 2002, the petitioners promptly applied to the High Court for constitutional relief, alleging that because of the delay it would be unfair and oppressive to...