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EU-USA: Council of the European Union: Implementation of the MLA/Extradition Agreements with the US – next steps

01 August 2011

EU-USA: Council of the European Union: Implementation of the MLA/Extradition Agreements with the US – next steps (pdf). See: Agreements on Extradition and on Mutual Legal Assistance between the EU and the US (2003)

In 2003 the EU and he USA signed two agreements: one on extradition and the other on mutual legal assistance. This took six years to formalise (28 October 2009) and both Agreement came into force on 1 February 2010. Under Article 3 of the Agreements their scope is defined in relation to, first, existing US bilateral mutual legal assistance agreements with EU Member States and second, to come into play where existing agreements are silent. This requires lawyers, journalists and researchers in each EU state to track through bilateral treaties with the USA and the case-law related to them.

This is confirmed in this CATS (Article 36 Committee) document which discusses the idea of a common Handbook and concluded that: "The majority of delegations was of the opinion that a Handbook... serve little practical purpose, as the practitioners did not base their requests on the EU-US Agreements, but rather on the bilateral extradition and mutual legal assistance treaties each Member State had with the United States." [emphasis added]

See: Draft Handbook (pdf)

The Presidency also reported: "a number of problems in the cooperation with the US arise from differences in the interpretation of the relevant provisions of the agreements, for example the Article 4 of the MLA Agreement (identification of bank information)."