Lord Justice Laws is a terrific name for a judge, isn’t it? The sort of playing card you might find in a Mr Men or a Happy Families pack, alongside Mr Bun the Baker and Mr Pipe the Crack Addict. Apparently he is a real person, and has recently delivered his verdict in the case of the so-called “NatWest Three”, a trio of British citizens facing extradition to the US. He decided that they should go.

The NatWest Three is the sort of name you more usually find given to downtrodden black people who have suffered some alleged injustice at the hands of our judicial system or the police. In sociological terms the NatWest Three couldn’t be more different: they are affluent businessmen, white and middle class.

For this reason alone your heart may have resisted the temptation to bleed on their behalf. You may even have tired a little of the rather sickly campaign mounted by their supporters, the surprisingly articulate letter to Tony Blair, pleading for help, apparently written by the 10-year-old daughter of one of the men.

Certainly their privileged background and the crime they are accused of committing do not tug at the heartstrings. In short, David Bermingham, Giles Darby and Gary Mulgrew are accused of having defrauded NatWest. It is alleged that they advised the bank to sell part of an Enron business it owned cheaply and then, once NatWest had done so on their advice, gleefully bought into the business and as a result trousered £1.5m each. It is the dread word “Enron” that has interested the US, of course.

In the High Court, Laws determined that the case for extradition could not be viewed in a “simplistic” manner and thus opened the door for the men to be dispatched to Texas, where they will almost certainly be refused bail for the couple of years it will take the case to come to court.

The “simplistic” analysis to which his lordship alluded is this: the men are British citizens who are not accused of committing any crime against any US organisation or institution, only briefly set foot on US soil and against whom the only prima facie evidence seems to have come from them when they reported the matter to the authorities over here.

If they committed any crime it was here in Britain, against a British company and had almost nothing whatsoever to do with the United States. NatWest, meanwhile, has shown no enthusiasm for prosecuting the men in Britain. You suspect that, in his judgment, Laws may have been confusing the word “simplistic” with the word “simple”.

But Laws is an eminent practitioner of the law and not to blame. The problem lies with Britain’s Extradition Act of 2003, a piece of one-sided, forelock-tugging, new Labour legislation foisted upon us by a cringing David Blunkett in the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center.

It was intended to give the US carte blanche to bang up British-born or domiciled Al-Qaeda operatives when British intelligence for doing so was thin on the ground. But as with all such bilateral agreements with Washington, it has been interpreted liberally by the American authorities so that alleged fraudsters can be extradited — while at the same time no reciprocal deal has been ratified by the US government. It was ever thus.

In 30 years hardly any alleged IRA terrorists have been extradited from the United States to Britain, despite the fact that the accused were in the main: British citizens; had committed their alleged crimes on British soil; and there was prima facie evidence to prosecute them. We tried to extradite but in nearly every case — Desmond Mackin and Peter McMullen spring to mind — extradition was refused because US courts decided the defendants could not expect a fair trial in a country that had inflicted 1,000 years of oppression upon the Irish.

To precis the current situation: we send British citizens to face the vagaries of the US justice system regardless of whether they committed any crime against any US institution and where there is little evidence of any crime. The United States, meanwhile, continues to refuse Britain’s extradition requests even when they concern British citizens who commit atrocities on British soil and for which there is an abundance of evidence. A little one-sided, this special relationship?

When it came to alleged IRA terrorists, the US judiciary worried that those people we wished to extradite might not receive due process in the British courts, what with us being imperialists and racists. So here’s a question: do you think British citizens whom the US believes to be members of Al-Qaeda will get a fair trial in the US? In the state of Texas, which was devastated by the Enron implosion, will there be a fair trial for Messrs Bermingham, Darby and Mulgrew?

In short, doesn’t that one-sided Extradition Act prevent the British government from exercising one of its most important obligations: to protect British citizens and afford them justice?

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