to give due weight to what our friends in Europe have been telling us about the difficulties which civil law states face in attempting to meet the requirement. They have made it clear to us that the requirement itself has in practice had the effect of obstructing entirely proper extradition requests. For example, one European country has told "s that it no longer attempts to extradite fugitives from the United Kingdom save in the gravest of cases. Another explained that it declined over a period of ten years to make any requests at all because of the demands made by UK law. The experience of Spain, which denounced its treaty in 1978, is of course well known. European states have also made it clear that they object in principle to the retention of the requirement, whose very existence implies a criticism or, at least, a lack of trust in the judicial standards of a foreign state. This charge is difficult to refute; nor do I believe that such mistrust is in any way justified in regard to the foreign states with which the bulk of our extradition traffic takes place. The fact that civil law states follow different procedures does not mean that such procedures are inferior to
our own.
We have given very careful consideration to the proposal to retain the prima facie requirement while reforming our evidential rules. As it happens, we are considering urgently the possibility of relaxing the rules governing the admissibility of documentary evidence, on broadly the lines recommended by the Roskill Committee. This would certainly make it easier for foreign states to establish a prima facie case, but it would not remove the objection in principle that it is wrong for the United Kingdom to retain the right routinely to review the evidence in extradition cases. The United Kingdom would remain isolated within the European Convention in such a situation. I also very much doubt if it would be right to go further and admit other forms of hearsay evidence, even in the limited context of extradition. It is difficult to see how the magistrate could make a realistic assessment of the strength of the prosecution case if our evidential rules were to be relaxed to the extent proposed by the Nicholls brothers. I suspect that "evidence" submitted on this basis would serve little more purpose than the statement of facts which we shall require in support of extradition requests under article 12 of the European Convention.
We have accepted the suggestion made about jurisdiction and will be following substantially the 1967 Act model. We shall also be considering the outcome in the recent case of Rees. In view of these considerations we see no justification for departing from the White Paper proposal to remove the prima facie requirement. More generally I believe that it would be inconsistent for the United Kingdom to call for more effective international action to combat drug trafficking, terrorism or fraud while clinging to the requirement. It is clear that the United Kingdom is coming to be regarded as a haven for people accused of serious offences, and we cannot stand by and allow that situation to develop.
Perhaps I may make one last point. The Nicholls' submission refers to the distinction made by civil law countries between their own nationals and others in extradition law. Generally such countries are unwilling to extradite their own nationals, but this does not of course mean that they evade justice: the extensive extraterritorial jurisdiction of those countries make possible the effective prosecution of persons accused of offences abroad. We by contrast have traditionally been obliged to have first recourse to extradition even for our own nationals because extraterritorial prosecution is rarely available as an effective option. I know that Colin Nicholls has made the point that we need to