Protestors demonstrate in support of terror suspects Babar Ahmad and Syed Tahla Ahsan outside the High Court in central London, on October 5, 2012. Radical Islamist preacher Abu Hamza and four other men are set to be extradited to the United States after a British court on Friday rejected their last-ditch attempts to block their removal. Fellow terror suspects Khaled Al-Fawwaz, Syed Tahla Ahsan, Adel Abdul Bary and Babar Ahmad were also denied an injunction. AFP PHOTO / LEON NEAL

Not content with having the largest domestic prison population in the world, both in numbers and as a percentage of the total population, the US also imports prisoners from other countries, at vast expense.

Last week, five men were extradited to the US from the UK to face charges relating to their alleged involvement with terrorism. The men’s extradition was supposed to have been made into a straightforward matter by the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who, in 2003, approved the US-UK Extradition Treaty, which purportedly allows prisoners to be extradited without the need for any evidence to be provided.

However, there have been sustained legal challenges to the treaty, with the result that, of the five men extradited last week, two British nationals, Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan, had been held without charge or trial in the UK for eight and six years respectively, and two foreign nationals, Adel Abdel Bary and Khaled al-Fawwaz, had been held without charge or trial since 1998, as their lawyers tried to prevent their extradition. The fifth man, Abu Hamza al-Masri, was the only one to have been imprisoned in the UK after a trial. Convicted in 2006, he was given a seven-year sentence.

On arrival in the US last Friday, all five men were jailed — Babar Ahmad and Talha Ahsan in Connecticut, and the others in New York. All appeared in front of judges on Saturday where they pleaded not guilty to the charges against them, and the New York prisoners were told that their trials will take place next year.

The problem, as politicians, lawyers and campaigners in the UK have tried for years to establish is that there are not necessarily compelling reasons for the men to have been extradited, because of fundamental weaknesses in the treaty. In June 2011, the UK Parliament’s Joint Committee on Human Rights said in a report that safeguards in US cases were “inadequate,” and, as the BBC explained, also said that “more evidence was needed to justify requests and judges should be able to refuse them if they were not in the ‘interests of justice.’”

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