Deborah Dark, now a 45 year-old grandmother from London, was acquitted by a court in France in 1989 of possessing a large quantity of cannabis, the court accepting her plea that she had been set up by her boyfriend of the time.
Mrs Dark, who had her then eight-year-old daughter Claire in the car with her when she was arrested, was driving back to Britain from Spain when French customs officers discovered several kilos of cannabis concealed in the sunroof and under the floor of her hire car. It was a nightmare that was to lead to her spending eight months in a French prison before her case went to trial.
Recalling the incident Mrs Dark, who upon returning to Britain after her acquittal cut all ties with the man who the court agreed had actually planted the drugs in the car, told the
Telegraph:
I was only 24 and very naive. I'd only known my boyfriend for about nine months and when he asked me to hire the car in my name because he didn't have a driving licence, I did it unthinkingly
Believing her ordeal was over Mrs Dark carried on with her life, traveling back to France on several occasions during the 1990s and the early 2000s. All the time unaware, as seemingly were the French officials she encountered, that in 1990 the prosecution from her case had launched an appeal against her acquittal and secured a conviction. The court passed a six-year prison sentence on Mrs Dark in her absence. An International Arrest Warrant was issued at the time but never enforced.
In 2004 the British government incorporated into law the terms of the European Arrest Warrant, which the
Telegraph describes as making "the extradition process in Europe a virtual rubber stamp".
So it was that in 2006 Mrs Dark became the subject of a European Arrest Warrant, when one was obtained by a public prosecutor in Pau, a town in Southwestern France.
Still Mrs Dark had no knowledge of her predicament. But in 2007 she did start to realize that something was amiss when, upon entering passport control in Turkey she was arrested by armed officers. She was released by the Turkish officials after they could not provide a reason for her arrest. Once back in Britain Mrs Dark contacted the police there but they too could find no record of any warrants outstanding in her name.
Come October 2008 and Mrs Dark went to visit her father, who had retired to Spain, accompanied by her daughter and grandsons. On her way home she was arrested by Spanish officials who, after positively identifying her from a photograph taken in 1988, told her that she would be extradited to France to face the six-year prison sentence that had been imposed by the court in 1990. The shock caused Mrs Dark to collapse.
A month in a prison in Madrid followed before a Spanish court ruled that the original extradition order had effectively been invalidated by the passage of time. However her ordeal was still not over as British authorities duly arrested her, again because of the outstanding warrant, when she returned home, eventually releasing her on bail after she had spent 24 hours in prison. In April 2009 a British judge agreed with the decision of her Spanish counterpart and refused to extradite Mrs Dark on the basis that the time elapsed since her first arrest and trial was too great and it was not certain that true justice could be done. That Mrs Dark was a carer for her grandchildren and had not engaged in any criminal activity since 1989 were cited as other reasons for refusing to enforce the extradition order.
Unable to leave Britain for fear that she will be liable to arrest elsewhere in Europe Mrs Dark has been described by Fair Trials International, who have taken up her case, as being "imprisoned". The
BBC reports Jago Russell, Chief Executive of the organization, as saying:
Deborah's case is a shocking example of the way a system intended to deliver justice has created a blatant injustice. The European Arrest Warrant should have been designed with a time-limit built in but it wasn't. The result - a person's life can be turned upside down for an event alleged to have happened 20 years ago
Yet the last word belongs to Mrs Dark herself. And unsurprisingly she has no doubt as to what the case has done to her:
It's destroyed me, and to see my daughter to go through all that pain again. I just will never forget it
