The European Arrest Warrant (EAW) is a mechanism by which individuals wanted in relation to significant crimes are extradited between EU member states to face prosecution or to serve a prison sentence for an existing conviction. In the UK extradition policy is owned by the Home Office.
Every country in the EAW system has a Sirene (Supplementary Information Request at the National Entry) Bureau. In the UK this is the NCA. Sirene Bureaux are the legal gateways between authorities requesting an arrest and those carrying out an arrest.
The NCA’s role is to assess the proportionality and legal validity of EAW requests into and out of the UK, against criteria in the Extradition Act 2003. The NCA places validated EAWs on national systems and, in high risk cases, carries out work to locate offenders and alert the relevant authority, usually the local police force.
EAW requests which are not validated are returned to the requesting authority for further action.
It is not the role of the NCA to look at the evidence a warrant is based on or decide if an extradition is ordered. In the UK, these are judicial matters. If an extradition is ordered by the court following an arrest, the NCA facilitates the return of the wanted person.
The statistics are broken down as follows:
It is important to understand the differences between requests, arrests and surrenders.
Requests: The number of requests received by the UK does not represent the number of wanted people in the UK. Some member states issue requests to numerous member states when they do not know where a subject may be. A large proportion of the requests received by the UK will be for people who are not, and never have been, in the UK. Similarly it would be inaccurate to calculate the number of wanted people in Europe by adding together the total number of requests for every member state. To do this would count the same individuals many times over.
Arrests: This represents the number of people who have been identified as being in the UK and have been arrested, usually by the local police force.
Surrenders: People arrested on an EAW have the right to appeal against or to contest their extradition. The surrenders figure represents the number of people who - having either failed in their appeal or chosen not to appeal - are extradited.
It is also worth noting that request, arrest and surrender figures do not necessarily relate to the same group of people, in the same year, given that processes and timescales can overlap.
The UK joined the law enforcement element of the Schengen Information System (SIS II) on 13 April 2015. This is a Europe-wide means of sharing information to assist law enforcement and border control. In preparation for joining, the NCA, as the UK’s Sirene Bureau, changed the way Part 1 cases are recorded. Previously, low-risk or non-UK cases were not recorded as individual requests. Now all requests, irrespective of a UK connection, are recorded. This has resulted in a higher number in 2014/15 than in previous years.
If there is no appeal, or an appeal is unsuccessful, there is a period of 10 days within which the subject must be removed.