Presumably someone squealed on him...

[major_clanger]

The Guardian reports on the growing tendency of Eastern European nations to file extradition requests against their nationals living in the UK, in most cases for trivial offences. Whilst this is posing a serious problem for UK police forces, which are becoming overwhelmed with demands to find. arrest and extradite people charged with offences that would probably get a caution for locals, I was amused by one example of the sort of criminal being pursued:

a Lithuanian was extradited last year on a charge of "piglet-rustling"

More seriously, this is a good illustration of why we should be wary of legislative moves that might vastly increase the number of trivial criminal infractions (e.g. 'buying a mobile phone without a passport').

Comments

[murphys-lawyer.livejournal.com]

I was unnerved enough at the (mis)use of the EU warrant against Gerald Toben, but "piglet-rustling"?

[waistcoatmark.livejournal.com]

Unusual target of the law: usually we have laws against _selling_ things to the wrong sort of person, not buying. Or is that just because until recently our benevolent lords and masters have only restricted the purchases of items by people considered too young to responsibly own them (who are thus too young to easily prosecute)?

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Well, I suspect that any implementation of this proposal would probably target the vendor, so yes. Perhaps a better choice of trivial offence may be one of those that would be created by some of the proposals to criminalise copyright infringement, although what is more worrying there are the repeated attempts (more on this later!) to make such behaviour subject to punishment by non-judicial sanction, i.e. disconnect.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that's how they'd deal with the phone thing - if you'd managed to buy without a passport vendor gets knuckles rapped, you just get line disconnected. Presumably with no refund!

[marypcb.livejournal.com]

is there a legal basis for the 'threshold' that the CPS applies that could be applied to the extradition requests or is it just common sense? And I wonder if other EU countries go chasing after all the Polish requests in the same way, or if this is another instance of us applying rules other countries just don't get around to...

[andrewducker]

It'd have to be "buying a SIM card without a passport".

And then they'd have to find some way of dealing with all those people arriving in the country from foreign places, bringing their filthy for'n electronics with them...

Seriously, it's completely unworkable on a national level, unless they want to make life very hard for travelling businessmen and tourists, who are probably the only people keeping us afloat right now. It reads very much like someone in Whitehall thought it sounded like a good idea, but it'll never get anywhere near being a law.

[purplecthulhu.livejournal.com]

There's a lot of things this lot have put into law, or spent a huge amount of money on, in spite of the massive practical problems. That's the advantage if a large majority - you're invulnerable to good sense...

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

'buying a mobile phone without a passport'

Sorry, what? Is this so that all phone conversations can be indexed by people's ID card numbers in the future or something?

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article4969312.ece

It seems to have come to the attention of the Ministry of Love Home Office that one can buy a pre-paid mobile phone without proof of ID, thus allowing anonymous communication. Clearly, Something Must Be Done about this...