NORTHLONDON TODAY | NEWS | Gary McKinnon’s mother Janis appears at the Home Affairs Select Committee | 2010

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Gary McKinnon’s mother Janis appears at the Home Affairs Select Committee

Wednesday, 01 December 2010

By Mary McConnell

LEAKED cables from the US Embassy have revealed that ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown personally appealed to the US government to allow computer hacker Gary McKinnon to serve any jail sentence in the UK instead of the US.

The revelation emerged as Mr McKinnon’s mother Janis Sharp, former Home Secretary David Blunkett and Liberty director Shami Chakrabarti all gave evidence at a Home Affairs Select Committee Inquiry into current extradition law yesterday.

Mr McKinnon, 43, from Palmers Green, faces up to 60 years in a US jail after he hacked into 97 military computers in 2001 and 2002.

US prosecutors want to bring him to the States under the controversial extradition treaty that Mr Blunkett signed with the Americans in 2003.

The treaty has been slammed because British prosecutors most provide evidence the person committed a crime before they can extradite from the US, but the Americans need only show a person is suspected of committing a crime.

Lawyers for Mr McKinnon, who suffers from Asperger syndrome, have always argued that sending him to the US would be a breach of the Human Rights Act.

According to a cable leaked by the whistle-blowing website Wikileaks, Mr Brown appealed to the US ambassador Louis Susman in August last year asking if Mr McKinnon could serve his sentence in the UK if he made a full confession and statement of contrition. At the same time, the former Home Secretary Alan Johnson was refusing to block the extradition, leaving it to the courts to decide whether it would violate Mr McKinnon’s human rights.

Responding to a question from Keith Vaz MP, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, Mr Blunkett admitted that he might not have signed the extradition treaty if he knew then what he knows now.

“I would raise the issues we have heard this morning,” he said, but argued: “You suggest people from this country would be removed on the nod. That is not true – they haven’t and they won’t be.”

Mr Blunkett said he was not surprised at the revelation that Mr Brown had appealed to US politicians to drop Mr McKinnon’s extradition.

He said: “I agreed it was a good idea not to end up with these cases being a political football but you can’t ignore something that becomes incredibly high profile. In such cases there is massive public attention and there was a place for senior politicians to make representations.

“Because of the nature of the complications and difficulty of this case – not just in the relationship with the Americans, but also in precedents it might set – there are difficulties.”

Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty which campaigns for human rights, was also giving evidence. She told the committee there was a fundamental problem with the way the current law allows the US to remove people from their home country without any evidence of them having committed a crime.
She said: “The Americans have it right – they have a protection that their people should have and that we should have too. There needs to be a fundamental change. I do support extradition and years ago it was a very convoluted system with it ping-ponging between the courts and the politicians, but the mistake was to suppress the discretion of the courts.”

She said three fundamental requirements should be: evidence that someone has committed the crime; it must be an offence in both countries; justice is better served in that country.

Mrs Sharp told the committee she was surprised to learn Mr Brown had appealed to the US in a bid to prevent the extradition. She said: “I wish I had known about it before. I was surprised at the US reaction – if someone asks you to do something you do it, that is what friends do. They didn’t seem to want to give way.

“Being sent abroad is a huge punishment. People who are sent abroad to stand trial lose their jobs, their families and can lose their lives. I don’t want to see my son in an institution because his mental health is going down hill so rapidly and I don’t want to see him die in a foreign prison.”

Home Secretary Theresa May will give evidence on December 14.

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