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The Washington Post European police have arrested dozens of alleged terrorists since Sept. 11, but the continent's harsh view of the U.S. legal system -- particularly President Bush's plan for secret military tribunals -- is creating resistance to possible extradition of suspects to the United States for trial. Authorities in Spain this week expressed reluctance to hand over eight alleged terrorists they have arrested if it meant the men would be put before a U.S. tribunal. Legal analysts predict that suspects jailed in Britain, Belgium, France and Germany will raise similar objections to avoid extradition. Bush met today in Washington with Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar of Spain, but White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said the extradition issue did not come up, and suggested that it was moot because the United States has not requested the men's extradition. Aznar said at a photo session afterward that Spain would study the issue if the United States made an extradition request. "The United States is free to organize its own jurisdiction as it sees fit, as a free and democratic country," Aznar said. "Any action taken on the extradition issue will be taken with [the] full respect of Spanish and United States law." Aznar said Spain "supports, has supported, and will support all the United States' efforts to track down, to eradicate and to eliminate terrorism wherever it may be worldwide." He added that Spain would, if necessary, strengthen its "cooperation in the area of intelligence and security and information-sharing, and, if need be, to commit military forces to that battle." But across Europe, debate is beginning over how to handle any U.S. requests. "Nobody could deny that the U.S. should have primary jurisdiction" in the Sept. 11 cases, said Robert Badinter, a French senator and former justice minister. "But there are two problems. First, the U.S. has the death penalty. This is barbaric to Europe. And now Bush wants these special courts-martial, with few protections. "Under the European Convention on Human Rights, it would be illegal for a government here to extradite under those conditions," added Badinter, who as justice minister championed a campaign to end capital punishment in France. Human rights experts on this side of the Atlantic argue that not even Osama bin Laden could be legally extradited unless the United States agreed to give him a full public trial and waive the death penalty. "This is the nightmare scenario, and the [British] Foreign Office is worrying about it," said Nicholas Blake, of the London law firm Matrix Chambers. "If the SAS [the special British troops now in Afghanistan] walk into a cave and find bin Laden first, before the Americans get there, it may be an illegal act for a British officer to hand him over to your courts." European extradition delays have frustrated U.S. prosecutors for years in the legal battle against bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist organization. Federal prosecutors in New York have indicted three Londoners -- Khalid Al-Fawwaz, Ibrahim Eidarous and Adel Abdel Bary -- on charges of involvement in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. Among much other evidence, the United States has demonstrated in British courts that two of the suspects' fingerprints were on an al Qaeda document discussing plans for those attacks. But Al-Fawwaz, who authorities here contend once ran al Qaeda's British operation from a storefront office in north London, and his two associates have successfully fought extradition. Britain's highest court is expected to rule on the case within days. If the men lose, they can take their case to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. That appeal could easily consume another year. The Al-Fawwaz case has sparked so much controversy in Britain's feisty tabloid papers that David Blunkett, Britain's home secretary -- the rough equivalent of the attorney general in the United States -- went on television recently promising to introduce new fast-track extradition procedures "within six weeks." That promise was made eight weeks ago; no proposal has been submitted. "There's a huge body of safeguards in British law, in European law, to protect people from being sent off to trial in an unjust system," said Francesca Klug of the Center for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics. "And yes, these cases can go on for a long time." The European human rights convention -- a post-World-War II treaty that 34 governments have committed to honor -- prohibits the death penalty for any crime. In language similar to the U.S. Bill of Rights, the treaty guarantees public trials, the right to a jury, the right to confront witnesses and the right to an attorney. These requirements would not be met in the closed-door military tribunals Bush has proposed for trying foreigners accused of terrorism. Over the years, the European rules have not acted as a complete bar to extradition to the United States. Suspects are often turned over if the U.S. attorney general provides a written declaration to the country holding the defendant saying that the Justice Department does not "expect" prosecutors to seek the death penalty. No defendant sent to the United States under such terms has been executed, Klug said. U.S. prosecutors "don't like it, because it takes away one of their strongest chips for plea bargaining," said a U.S. diplomat who has handled the "side letters," as the documents are known. "But they know they aren't going to get their hands on these guys at all unless they make some accommodation." Defense attorneys in Europe have alleged that the United States tries to circumvent the death penalty issue by seeking extradition on minor charges -- and then indicting for a capital crime once the defendant is on U.S. soil. British lawyer Hugo Keith said today he was worried about that tactic in the high-profile extradition case of Lotfi Raissi, an Algerian pilot he is defending. A month ago, U.S. officials said Raissi may have trained some of the suicide pilots who hijacked planes on Sept. 11 and could be charged with conspiracy. But this week, when the United States filed a formal statement seeking Raissi's extradition, the charges mainly involved making false statements on immigration and license forms. Even before Bush's Nov. 13 executive order authorizing secret military trials for alleged foreign terrorists, European courts and politicians were harshly critical of the U.S. criminal justice system in general and of Bush in particular. "Because of the Texas experience, President Bush is known as the world champion executioner," said Badinter, the French senator. "So Europeans were already wary." A European diplomat working on the issue said European cooperation on future terrorism cases might be easier if the United States would issue diplomatic notes in each case guaranteeing defendants the standard legal protections, even if tried in a military court. Staff writer Mike Allen in Washington
and special correspondents Gretchen Hoff in Paris and Shannon Smiley
in Berlin contributed to this report. Copyright 2001 The Washington Post Adobe PDF downloadable
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