The prime minister admitted in her statement to the commons yesterday that it would be “futile” for Britain to issue a formal extradition request to detain and bring to trial Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, the two Russians accused of committing the Salisbury novichok attack. Russia, she said, has “repeatedly refused to allow its nationals to stand trial overseas” and has a constitutional bar on the extradition of its citizens. Nonetheless, she did say that should either of these individuals ever again travel outside Russia, “we will take every possible step to detain them, to extradite them and to bring them to face justice here in the United Kingdom”. What does this really mean? The UK yesterday issued a European arrest warrant, an EU-wide alert…

Source: The Times September 05, 2018 23:01 UTC