When Sir Michael Bichard was finalising his report on child protection measures after the Soham murders of 2002, he took some trouble to ensure the institutions he was about to criticise would give his recommendations a fair wind. On the BBC’s Law in Action this week, he told me how important it was for the immediate responses to be as supportive as possible.

If that was what Sir Scott Baker and his colleagues had hoped for when they published their 486-page review of extradition law last week, they will have been disappointed. ‘We don’t just disagree with this review, but are completely baffled by it,’ said Shami Chakrabarti, director of the human rights group Liberty. ‘Frankly, the Baker report is inexplicable,’ added David Davis MP. ‘I am concerned that the extradition review has not shed any light on the ease of extradition,’ concluded the chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Committee, Keith Vaz.

Let me see if I can help. There is some concern that we in the UK are too willing to send our own citizens for trial or punishment to countries that would not send their citizens for trial here. In Chakrabarti’s colourful phrase, ‘it’s time we stopped parcelling people off around the world like excess baggage’.

The Scott Baker review was asked to consider two main areas of concern; the US and Europe. Critics maintain that it is easier for the US to get someone extradited by the UK than it is for us to get someone handed over by the Americans. On Europe, people are now beginning to realise that a traditional extradition system was replaced in 2004 with informal arrangements under which an arrest warrant issued by any one of the 27 EU states is valid and enforceable in all of them. These arrangements require mutual recognition of legal systems that the UK would certainly not recognise as providing the minimum standards and safeguards.

The campaign to reform the extradition treaty with the US is backed by commercial lobbying groups. This should come as little surprise; in recent years, the US has sought the extradition of bankers and businessmen for fraud-related offences. As these individuals were not facing charges under English law, they had every incentive to fight extradition. Discrediting the US-UK extradition treaty in the public’s mind was just one weapon in their armoury.

They seem not to have impressed the former Lord Justice Scott Baker and his two colleagues, even though one of them is Anand Doobay, a partner in the solicitors’ firm Peters & Peters, who specialises in representing businessmen facing extradition. The third member of the panel is David Perry QC, who was renowned for his fairness as a full-time Old Bailey prosecutor and who now defends as well as prosecutes.

The current extradition treaty between the US and the UK took effect in April 2007. Until then, it is fair to say our respective extradition arrangements were unbalanced. And now? When the UK seeks the extradition of someone in the US, it must provide ‘such information as would provide a reasonable basis to believe that the person sought committed the offence for which extradition is requested’. This must be read with the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution, which says ‘no warrants shall issue but on probable cause’. In summary, a request from the UK to the US must be supported by information - not evidence - satisfying the probable cause test.

Because the UK has designated the US under the Extradition Act 2003, requests from the US do not need to be accompanied by evidence either. All that’s needed is information that would justify the issue of an arrest warrant. This is the reasonable suspicion test.

The US government believes the two tests are equally balanced, as I reported here in July. Last week, the Scott Baker panel agreed. ‘In our opinion,’ they said, ‘there is no significant difference between the probable cause test and the reasonable suspicion test.’ Any difference was one of semantics rather than substance.

What about extradition within Europe? This, says the review panel, is based on ‘mutual trust, not blind faith… The system of surrender is by no means automatic’. But the principle of mutual recognition, as Scott Baker sees it, is that EU member states ‘should not fear the differences between their legal systems and that these differences are not a sufficient basis to justify a refusal to cooperate’.

The real problem is that there has been a huge increase in arrest warrants submitted by other member states. While the number of people returned to the UK each year has remained reasonably constant - 63 in 2005 compared with 71 in 2009 - the number of people sent from the UK has risen over the same four-year period from 77 to 699. This is because some states are issuing European Arrest Warrants without considering whether there are more proportionate ways of achieving justice. A proportionality test should be introduced when the opportunity arises, the review recommends, and states should use their discretion in the meantime.

The review team’s call for steady improvements at EU level to the working of the European Arrest Warrant - rather than radical reform - has received a broad welcome from Fair Trials International, which has developed from slightly quirky origins into a highly respected source of specialist knowledge. Far from being ‘baffled’ by the review, the campaign group sees it as something to build on. It is more likely to achieve its aims than those who resort to abuse.