Passport to Injustice

Dragan Paravinja is the subject of a manhunt as he is now suspected of kidnapping a young Croat girl by the Croatian authorities.

One day before my trip to London, where I had to do some interviews for my articles about extradition policy, I was watching Croatian national television channel HTV.

The top story was the massive hunt for Dragan Paravinja, a lorry driver suspected of kidnapping the 17-year-old girl Antonia Bilic from Drnis, Croatia, who has been missing since June 7.

The case is now a huge scandal and has attracted enormous publicity because of the fact that Paravinja was already a suspect for rapes and attempted rapes in Slovenia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina. He had – thanks to his Croatian passport – managed to avoid facing charges in those countries.

More than that, Paravinja had been employed in Croatia without any attempts to extradite him, despite the fact that all three countries had issued arrest warrants.

According to Croatian media reports, there are another five Croat nationals wanted in connection with rape allegations by Interpol, and an additional 35 suspected killers who have dodged the courts because they have Croatian passports and the crimes of which they are suspected were committed in other states.

The Croatian media has commented that the country is an ideal haven for international criminals because they can rape or kill in other countries and live freely in Croatia because Zagreb does not extradite its own nationals.

In Brussels, at the European Commission, I heard that these sorts of cases were the reason why the European Arrest Warrant, EAW, was introduced within European Union member states. It is regarded by the commission as one of its greatest achievements.

“The EAW abolishes the old system of non-execution of surrender on the grounds of a person’s nationality. This is one of the most significant achievements.

However, it was at the expense of some constitutional difficulties in some member state,” says the European handbook on how to use the EAW.

While the commission may be keen to stress the successes of the EAW, many experts fear it has been overused and often without recourse to the proper checks and balances a longer extradition process allows for.

Extradition times vary across Europe. According to European Commission statistics, in Luxembourg, suspects are almost automatically extradited. There, the extradition process can be completed within just one to five days.

The longest extradition procedure is in place in the Czech Republic, where suspects are extradited within a maximum period of 40 days.

Commission documents reveal the average time for EAW extraditions is 16 days in the UK, if the suspect does not contest the warrant, rising to an average of 93 days if the suspect does not agree to being extradited.

Before the EAW was introduced in 2004, the average time taken to extradite suspects within the EU was one year.

In the last year alone, one fifth of those extradited by EU member states were their own citizens. Despite this, countries including Germany, France, Austria and Belgium do not extradite their own citizens to non-EU member states.

The country which, unlike Croatia, surrenders its own nationals most easily is the UK.

According to Scot Crosby, an expert in EU legislation and lawyer with the Kemmler Rapp Bohlke & Crosby law firm in Belgium, most EU nationals have the constitutional right to be protected by the state, but that is not the case in UK law.

He says the main problem is that the EAW is designed to provide maximum efficiency with minimum procedures and time.

“The fiction is that justice is equally good in all member states of EU. It is the opposite, in many ways all are bad,” he says.

The fact there have been around 18,000 European Court of Human Rights rulings against the use of the EAW in the past five years demonstrates, according to Crosby, its shortcomings.

Although most experts agree that the EAW proved to be an effective tool against crime in a post-9/11 terror attacks world, all mention cases that demonstrate inefficiencies.

In France, a lorry driver was sentenced to 14 months for illegal human trafficking. On release, he was re-arrested for the same offence in Belgium, as he had trafficked people through France and Belgium.

Verbert Erik, a legal adviser to the Belgian federal justice service, criticises this as a waste of public funding, noting that everyone who is arrested on the basis of an EAW has a lawyer appointed to represent him or her, at a cost to the Belgian state alone of around €30m each year.

Daniel Mansell, policy officer at Fair Trials International, says the EAW has been used particularly disproportionately by the Polish – among other states - where an EAW was issued for a person with a bank debt, another for failing to fulfil parental duties and for one person who was accused of stealing a bicycle.

Another EAW was issued for one British national accused of forging €100, while a British woman was arrested three times in three separate countries on charges of failing to fulfil parental duties.

After discussing the situation in the Balkans, where those suspected of committing serious crimes can easily dodge justice, Mansell’s message to Balkan states was to implement a similar arrest mechanism, but to learn the lessons from the EAW.

Slobodanka Jovanovska is a Skopje-based journalist who is participating in the 2011 Balkan Fellowship for Journalistic Excellence.

She will be writing regular updates on her investigation into extradition agreements in the Balkans and in European Union member states.