SolGen Says Extradition Laws are Fairly Antiquated

Nigel Hawke

While there are areas in which Belize’s laws are consistent with the expectations of the UNCAC treaty, Solicitor General Nigel Hawke says that there is also work that needs to be done to bring local legislation up to par with international requirements.  He cites the international transfer of prisoners as one such area.

Nigel Hawke, Solicitor General

“We need to overhaul our extradition legislation.  We still have aspects of the old 1870 UK act.  We don’t have any comprehensive legislation dealing with international prison transfer.  So those are some of the areas which we think we need to really look at to improve upon, but the ones that we have they are there and they’re workable.  We have some that we can use but we’ll need to improve some of them.  We also highlighted the fact that we also took to the CCJ in 2011, I believe, the Attorney General against Florencio Marin and Joe Coye which established the fact the Attorney General, a sitting Attorney General, can now sue for misfeasance in office and that is a judicial precedent being followed throughout the Commonwealth now.  So we say on common law, we have that case that will support bringing actions against persons, well public officials who run afoul of the law.  And that court highlighted several steps that we can also take in terms of tracing, in terms of if ministers or public officials act in breach of their office.  So we think we have that, and then we also, lastly we spoke of the issue of the common law offense of criminal misconduct which I will basically yield to the DPP on that one since that is her arena.”