Thank you.
I think that we need to be clearer about political motivation in terms of the way I've used it in particular cases. There are a number of ways in which [Technical difficulty—Editor] argue that a prosecution was brought for an improper reason because, obviously, prosecutions are supposed to be brought in order to simply prosecute crimes that are legitimately suspected.
In some cases, one can point to a purely political motivation. For example, it's an opposition politician, and the government is simply bringing a prosecution in order to silence that politician. In other cases, there can be a commercial motivation. For example, the government has its own commercial interests and is trying to advance them by bringing a prosecution to support that. In some cases, there may be a political interest in terms of prosecuting a particular case. A government may feel public pressure to bring a prosecution because there is a crime that is particularly sensationalized within that [Technical difficulty—Editor].
In the U.K., we have a number of legal ways of dealing with particular cases. We can make arguments to the human rights bars to say that, if you're being prosecuted for a reason that's not proper, then it's a breach of convention articles. You can also make arguments under the abuse of process jurisdiction that I mentioned earlier, and, finally, we can make arguments in particular to what we call extraneous grounds. If you can prove that you're being prosecuted for your political opinion, your gender, your race or your nationality, then that also will operate as a bar.
I obviously have read something about the case that was referred to in the question, but I'm not claiming to be familiar with it. I think the difficulty with those types of cases can be that the government may have an interest in prosecuting a particular case because it's of great national importance, and it may do so with very little evidence to support its request. I think that would fall into a slightly different category in terms of what I have referred to as politically motivated requests, because when I use that term, I really mean that the government has its own political interest separate from simply prosecuting a crime, as opposed to the government being willing to overlook evidential difficulties in terms of trying to bring somebody to be [Technical difficulty—Editor].
We've had those cases in the U.K. After the terrorist attacks in the U.S., there was a particular case called Lotfi Raissi, where the U.S. tried to bring an extradition request. This was the case that gave rise to the principle I referred to, where the prosecutor was said to have to disclose material that undermined the U.S.'s case. That lead to the U.S., in fact, not pursuing the extradition request.