UK Ruling May Prompt Change in Extradition Law In Estonia
Parliament has been discussing a new bill to change who issues European arrest warrants in Estonia after UK courts rejected an arrest warrant for the country's most famous fugitive.
Anna-Maria Galojan, a former politician convicted of embezzlement and due to serve a prison sentence in Estonia, fled to the UK in January and was arrested by UK authorities on February after Estonian Ministry of Justice issued a European arrest warrant, or EAW.
The UK's Westminster municipal court rejected the EAW back on October 29, ruling that the Estonian Justice Ministry is not a judicial authority. Had a court issued the warrant, Galojan might have been extradited.
“The UK court had revealed with the Anna-Maria Galojan case that today’s Estonian justice institution responsible for issuing EAWs, the Ministry of Justice, is not suitable and thus we will make a change to name county courts as the responsible institution,” said Parliament Legal Affairs Committee chairman Marko Pomerants on ERR after early-morning discussion on December 1.
Although ostensibly a technicality, a streak of superciliousness ran through British discourse at the time of the decision, with the country's senior extradition judge John Thomas quoted in early November as saying that some EU member states' justice systems were "not up to scratch" and that British subjects' rights could be harmed were they to be extradited there.
Many other countries on the Continent use a similar system to Estonia's where a department of the executive-branch Justice Ministry issues warrants.
A case similar to Galojan's preceded hers. Dimitri Lavrov, convicted of a murder at a northeastern Estonia mental hospital in 2000, fled to the UK after being paroled, and an EAW was issued for him. That, too, was rejected, on October 12. Writing in daily Eesti Päevaleht, columnist Chris Glew argued that the Lavrov case set a damaging precedent for Estonia.
Last May, Galojan was convicted of stealing around 60,000 euros from the non-profit group European Movement Estonia while she headed the organization in 2007.
The Tallinn District Court handed down a sentence of 1 year and 10 months, which included five months in jail. After her appeal was rejected, she was due to report at Tallinn Prison on February 7.