To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department if he will give details of each extradition request by a foreign Government which has been (a) granted and (b) refused in each of the last five years. (134971)

For the purposes of this reply a copy of the table has been placed in the Library. The table has assumed that the details required in the question are the requesting country and the year of extradition, or the year in which the case was closed for other reasons. The figures exclude:

(i) any requests which may have been closed before arrests for extradition took place;

(ii) any requests made to Scotland or Northern Ireland, which are matters for the Scotland Office and Northern Ireland Office respectively; and

(iii) any requests made under the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) mechanism as these are made by the judicial authorities of other European Union member states rather than by foreign governments.

European Union member states entered the EAW on the following dates:

1 January 2004—Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, United Kingdom;

27 July 2004—Austria, Cyprus, France, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta. Netherlands, Poland, Slovenia;

1 March 2005—Czech Republic, Estonia, Germany, Greece, Slovakia; and

28 July 2005—Italy.

Finally, it should be noted that the requests to which the figures relate will in many cases have been made in earlier years than those in which the resulting extraditions took place or in which the cases were closed.