They have no way of taking him from Britain to face charges in Malaysia.
Recently, The Ant Daily carried an article in which the writer asked why the cops were looking for Alvin Tan and not for Raja Petra Kamarudin (RPK), the blogger who is living in exile in Britain.
Actually, the police know where RPK is but have no way of taking him back to Malaysia to face charges of sedition and criminal defamation.
“Back in 2009, not long after I left Malaysia, the police met with officials of the British High Commission to discuss the possibility of extraditing me,” RPK told FMT in a recent interview.
“The High Commission called my lawyers and asked for a detailed report on the matter, which my lawyers gave and which was sent to the British Home Office in London.
“Also in 2009, in the British Parliament, an MP raised the matter of my presence in the UK and the Malaysian extradition request, and the Home Minister gave a reply.”
Basically, the reply was that RPK was in the UK on his Malaysian passport but since he was born in England he was granted Right of Abode back in the 1980s. Hence he does not require a visa and can stay in the UK indefinitely.
On the matter of his extradition, there is no extradition treaty between Malaysia and the UK. “But that has not stopped the Malaysian government from applying for my extradition,” he said.
The extradition application must be done in a UK court. One of the key ingredients of an extradition application is dual criminality. That is in fact the first test to pass. Dual criminality means the crime or crimes that RPK was alleged to have committed in Malaysia must also be crimes in the UK.
RPK faces four charges of sedition and criminal defamation in Malaysia, but the UK abolished those laws on Jan 1 2010. That means the Malaysian government cannot extradite him.
So the issue is not that the Malaysian police do not know where RPK is. They do. And it is not that they did not attempt to extradite him back to Malaysia. They did.
The issue here is that under the dual criminality clause, UK laws do not allow his extradition if it is to face sedition and criminal defamation charges. And the same would apply if RPK was facing a charge of sodomy because in the UK gay sex between consenting adults is not a crime.
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