Extradition treaty review is bad news for McKinnon

A REVIEW of extradition treaty agreements between the US and the UK has ruled that they are fair, which could be bad news for the accused British NASA hacker Gary McKinnon.

According to Reuters a review of the UK treaty with the US found that it was not biased against British criminal suspects, which is news to anyone in the UK who is fighting extradition to the US, including McKinnon.

The review began in September and followed complaints about the agreement, not to mention McKinnon's six year fight against extradition. Those in opposition to it complain that, as it stands, it makes it easier to extradite people from Britain to the US than it is to extradite people in the opposite direction.

The review was led by retired Judge Scott Baker, who said that criticism of the treaty was based on misapprehensions about how it actually works in practice.

"The UK-U.S. extradition arrangements were examined in great detail and the panel concluded that the widespread perception that they operate in an imbalanced manner is not justified," says the report.

"There is no 'practical difference' between the information required of both countries when requesting extradition."

Although he has been fighting it for six years, extradition for the UFO obsessed Aspergers sufferer has long seemed like an inexorable eventuality. Successive Home Secretaries have claimed to support him, only to change their tunes, while US President Obama shunned attempts from the then Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to stop the extradition. µ