The EU Arrest Warrant serves Britain badly Theoretically, the European Arrest Warrant - which makes it easier to extradite citizens of one EU country to face criminal charges in another - has some significant advantages. But in reality, it does not work smoothly or beneficently in most cases. One basic problem is that the European regulations have been interpreted by British courts to mean that they are not allowed to examine the merits of an extradition request, and that they must endorse it without checking whether it is supported by reliable evidence. As a result, British citizens have been extradited to countries such as Bulgaria and Romania, whose legal systems cannot be described as fair or free from the taint of corruption. Britons have ended up serving long sentences in ghastly prisons after trials that would never have resulted in guilty verdicts in the UK. Indeed, the allegations would never even have led to prosecutions. There is a second problem with the warrant. Requests from other EU countries to extradite their own citizens living in Britain have risen fourfold over the past three years, clogging up our courts and costing British taxpayers millions. Last year, 1,355 people were sent for trial in other EU countries by British courts under the warrant. Dealing with these cases costs the British state at least £27 million. As our reporters - who attended two days of typical extradition proceedings in court - discovered, the court process itself is chronically inefficient and cumbersome. Most cases are adjourned because critical people or documents cannot be located. Moreover, some of the offences for which extradition is requested are trivial: in one case, for instance, a Pole living in Britain was wanted by the Polish authorities for stealing a wheelbarrow and tools worth just £60; in another, the Poles sought the extradition of one of their citizens because he had failed to pay a fine. Under the Lisbon Treaty, the British Government has the option of opting out of more than 100 EU regulations relating to extradition and transnational justice. If we opted out of everything, then we could decide which of those regulations we want to opt back into. That is the strategy which David Cameron and the Coalition seem committed to following. We applaud the Prime Minister and the Cabinet for their desire to remedy an unacceptable situation, but the question has to be asked: why has it taken so long? The German courts have for several years operated a "proportionality test" before devoting time and energy to extradition cases: the extradition request has to be for a serious crime, rather than a trivial one. That cuts down the amount of money and time the German courts devote to extradition cases significantly, and if a similar test were introduced here, it would have the effect of reducing a sizeable proportion of the cases that occupy our courts. The Germans instituted their test without opting out of anything: they simply noted that the principle of proportionality is part of the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights, and used that as the basis for employing the test. This proportionality rule has the additional benefit of allowing the Germans to consider the cost and effort of formal extradition before proceeding. The Dutch, meanwhile, have acted to ensure that Dutch citizens cannot be extradited for actions that are not crimes in Holland, and the French appear simply never to extradite a French citizen for trial in a foreign country. No sanctions have been imposed on either country by the EU authorities. Indeed, they appear to condone, or at least tolerate, the French and Dutch practices. Why have we not followed the German, French and Dutch examples? It would be the easiest way to protect our citizens from the injustices that the European Arrest Warrant can bring, and to stop our courts" time being wasted on trivial extradition requests. All the same, the British Government is right to take on the European Arrest Warrant at the most fundamental level: the way the law itself was made. The law and its associated regulations illustrate the basic problem with EU regulations. They have no democratic mandate. They are not made by an elected body but by a committee appointed in secret that sits in secret. Laws made in that fashion can never command the legitimacy they need to have if citizens are to respect and to obey them. That is why the Government is right to reject the EU justice regulations en masse, opting back in only to those that will be endorsed by the British people.