David Davis: I will campaign to scrap US-UK extradition treaty in memory of Mike Lynch

Tory MP says process ia a ‘terrible thing to put a British citizen through’ and it ‘doesn’t amount to justice at all’

Sir David Davis has vowed to campaign “in memory” of Mike Lynch to scrap the extradition treaty between the US and the UK.
Mr Lynch was charged with fraud in the United States in 2018 and fought being sent there for trial for years until he was extradited in 2023.
He was cleared of fraud by a San Francisco jury in June this year over the multibillion-dollar sale of Autonomy, his software company. Mr Lynch always denied fraud.
The UK-US extradition treaty was implemented in 2003 but Sir David said it was lopsided in favour of the Americans and does not provide adequate protections for British citizens.
The Tory MP and former Cabinet minister claimed British law had an “outbuilding of American commercial policy” and the situation must change.
Sir David, who had taken an interest in Mr Lynch’s extradition ordeal and developed a close relationship with him, said he viewed it as a “duty of care” to the late billionaire’s memory “that I’m going to actually maintain that campaign to get it [the extradition treaty] abolished”.
He told GB News: “We need to get a grip of this. Mike, when he’d won his case, almost the first thing he did was ring me up and say, ‘we’re going to have to defeat this treaty, we’re going to have to overcome this treaty and get it changed for the better’.
“So I view it as a sort of duty of care to his memory really that I’m going to actually maintain that campaign to get it abolished.”
His comments came after Mr Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah were believed to be among five bodies found in the search of the luxury superyacht Bayesian on Wednesday after it sank off the coast of Sicily.
Mr Lynch, his family members and his guests had gathered on the vessel to celebrate the tech tycoon’s acquittal in a US fraud trial.
Sir David, who has long been critical of the treaty, said that when British citizens are “dragged off to America” they are effectively “threatened” because of the US plea bargaining system.
“They’re told, ‘if you plead not guilty and you lose, you’ll go to prison for 25 or 30 years in a high security prison, you’ll probably never see your family again, almost never see your family again or you can plead guilty and we’ll do a deal for two or three years in an open prison, maybe the second half is served back in Britain’ and so on,” he said.
“So most people, faced with this prospect, will give in. And really, really unusually, Mike didn’t. Mike was incredibly brave. He basically said, ‘I’m not going to fold in front of this blackmail, and I’m going to fight it’.”
Sir David said the US extradition process is a “terrible thing to put a British citizen through” and it “doesn’t amount to justice at all”.
He said: “The reason it was done in the first place back in 2003, remember, this was just after 9/11 and so [Sir Tony] Blair was trying to bend over backwards to be supportive to George Bush, I guess, at the time and and conceded all these arrangements whereby you didn’t have to prove a prima facie case.
“We’ve had hundreds of Brits [extradited], and very, very few of them, I think only about a dozen of them have actually been terrorism cases. The vast majority have been commercial cases of one sort or another, rather like this one.
“And so what’s happened is that British law has become a sort of outbuilding of American commercial policy.”