TODAY Ian Norris, the former chief executive of Morgan Crucible, will be in the High Court, in the latest round of his long fight against extradition to the United States to face charges of price-fixing.

He is not alone. There has been an endless procession of Britons this year attempting to avoid the “perp walk” accompanied by American law enforcement officers to a courthouse and jail in the US. Their predicament has united business, human rights and legal communities in an unprecedented alliance to express concern that Britain has become a soft touch for foreign governments — often driven by their own political as well as legal agendas — who want to extradite British nationals and others who live here.

There are obvious dangers of sentimentality and xenophobia floating around this issue. So students are invited to take a cool view of the question Extradition to foreign courts: are our laws fair? in this year’s Times Law Awards competition sponsored by the leading set of chambers One Essex Court.

With a distinguished judging panel chaired by the Lord Chancellor and including the Lord Chief Justice and the Editor of The Times, the competition offers an unrivalled opportunity for students to present their views at the highest level. It comes at a time, moreover, when efforts are being made in the House of Lords to win changes to the extradition system.

The case that more than anything triggered current controversy was the stand by the NatWest Three to avoid extradition to Texas to face charges of fraud. As a by-product of the collapse of Enron it was a classic instance of the Americans and the British seeing the issue from entirely different perspectives. For the United States, it was a matter of bringing to book a bunch of “bad guys” for being involved in a monumental American-based scam. On this side of the Atlantic, critics argued that our laws made it too easy for UK residents to be extradited to face charges for actions that had allegedly taken place in the UK itself.

But the NatWest Three case is the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, such people were probably far from the minds of British legislators when they passed the Extradition Act 2003 that sets the scene for the current regime.

The trigger was 9/11. This galvanised international co-operation and crystallised the need — long felt in some quarters — to pull down the seemingly endless procedural obstacles to extradition to create a fast and effective way of dealing with global criminality and terrorism. The 2003 Act therefore brought in a fast-track European arrest warrant for 32 offences. Crucially UK citizens can be extradited now even if their actions do not constitute an offence in Britain. The basic premise is that the justice system of each member state is fair because each subscribes to the European Convention on Human Rights. But critics argue that this assumption is deeply flawed, saying that standards of justice vary hugely, with some countries paying lip service to the ECHR.

So in its zeal to leave no hiding place for frontier-skipping malefactors, has the British Government gone too far? In the interests of pragmatism, has natural justice been sidelined? Defenders of the current laws argue that before, suspect fugitives were able constantly to evade foreign courts (often on technicalities). This denied justice to victims of crimes committed overseas and it was only right for the Government to seal the loopholes and speed up the extradition process.

But what is meant by “fair”? Do current legislation and procedures measure up? And what,if any, reforms are needed? Arguably the most serious defect in the arrangements, critics say, is that British residents have lost the right to have a prima facie case established against them by foreign accusers. In many cases, as long as sufficient evidence is provided to justify an arrest warrant, that is enough for removal. Then there is the linked issue of double standards. Does it matter, for example, that the US does not have to show a prima facie case while the UK, by contrast, has to show “probable cause” when seeking extradition from the US? How important is reciprocity in judging fairness?

And what of the nature of the crime? As matters stand in Britain, an extraditable offence is one carrying a sentence of one year or more. But such a broad principle is riddled with opportunities for contrary interpretations. First, there is the issue of the “equivalence” of crime. Legal codes vary from one country to the next and it is not always easy to equate one crime with another. As the defence for Ian Norris points out, the offence of which their client is accused (price-fixing) was not a specific statutory offence in the UK at the time when it allegedly took place. This resulted in the attempt by US authorities to make it fit another category entirely (conspiracy to defraud). Fair or unfair?

Then there is the penal dimension. Is it relevant to issues of “fairness’’ that a crime in Britain carrying a penalty of 12 months carries a 20-year sentence in the country to which the accused person is being extradited? As Ben Strong, a barrister at One Essex Court, points out, extradition is necessary so that criminals who commit serious crimes abroad can be brought to book. But the process for sending a suspect overseas must be fair to the guilty and the wrongly accused alike. The question is whether the ease with which extradition can occur overrides basic ideas of fairness and justice.

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