I think the difficulty is really working out to what level you want to examine a case. I appreciate that your system, with the records of cases, is obviously slightly different from what we have in the U.K. As I was saying earlier on, in a large number of countries, no evidence at all needs to be provided. All that's required is for them to make allegations. As long as those allegations include criminal offences then that's sufficient. Those countries include, for example, Azerbaijan and Turkey. They used to include the Russian Federation before it withdrew from the Council of Europe.
You can see that the U.K. doesn't have any evidential test for a number of countries in which there's certainly controversy as to whether that should be the case.
I think the argument you're referring to as to whether the extradition process should be a trial is a difficult one, because obviously it is not possible to have a full trial applying the laws of the requesting state when you're dealing with an extradition case. There are cases in which, it seems to me, it would be appropriate to examine further the evidence that's put forward. Again, within the U.K. we tend to be able to do this by having the safeguards of human rights standards. In exceptional cases, those can be used to say there is a reason to examine the evidence in more detail than would ordinarily be done. This residual [Technical difficulty—Editor] abuse of process.
I completely understand that there is a tension and that it is not possible in every case to insist upon a trial when you're having an extradition hearing. But I do think that the system should cater to people in those exceptional cases where there is really something to be discussed in relation to the evidential test and there's a potential for unfairness.
This particularly arises in relation to a specific aspect of the case you mentioned. We have had this as well. There have been cases of people being extradited and then placed in pretrial detention for long periods of time because their case has in fact not been ready to be prosecuted. So the U.K. introduced a bar that says if the case has not been charged and is not ready to be tried, then that is a reason to stop extradition. That is to deal with situations within the EU for which there are long periods of pretrial detention. There were lots of requests being made [Technical difficulty—Editor] where people end up for many years in pretrial detention.