Iceland and the European Arrest Warrant

In yesterday’s post we looked a the extradition treaties made by the Republic Of Iceland. Now, essentially those “extradition schemes” come from two different Treaties, the first being The European Convention on Extradition, which has been ratified by the members of the Council of Europe, the second is a Pan-Nordic treaty on Extradition. The COE treaty provides means of extraditing foreigners, whereas the Pan-Nordic Treaty goes a step further and, under some conditions, opens a door to extraditing, e.g. an Icelander from Iceland to Norway. A similar a sort-of similar scheme, the European Arrest Warrant, exists in the EU. For example the following map shows the extradition treaties valid for Poland: (As of November 2011).

Extradition Treaties of Poland. PaBaMapa. Map by User:Avala. CC-BY-SA 3.0

As one can see, the European Arrrest Warrant covers the entire area of the EU.

Following recent developments, where a group of alleged robbers where caught in Poland and then set free, there has been a growing talk of Iceland participating in the EAW.

The fmr. Justice minister Björn Bjarnason claimed in an article in 2010 that the Icelandic Parliament had already given its approval for jumping on board. Apparently however, the matter is “pending” as can be seen on this official webpage of the EU. Now this raises, at least for me, a pair of questions.

Has Iceland already ratified the Treaty in Question as hinted by the fmr. minister of justice, and if that is in deed the case, what is blocking it from entering into force?

[Written in November 2011]