Mismanagement of the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) has led to a ‘no questions asked’ extradition regime with severe human and financial costs to those charged with minor offences, according to a report by Fair Trials International (FTI).

The report claims that EAWs are routinely issued for minor offences without regard to whether extradition is proportionate. It points to Poland, which has a criminal code that requires all offences to be prosecuted, no matter how minor, which issued 4,844 EAWs in 2009 compared with the UK’s 220.

FTI also claims that judicial decisions not to execute EAWs are frequently ignored, resulting in repeated arrests even after charges have been dropped.

It cites an example of a British man arrested in Spain, who was charged for counterfeit currency offences.

He was found not to have engaged in forgery and was released and allowed to return home.

Four years later he was arrested in the UK on an EAW and extradited back to Spain on the same charges.

Rather than face up to two years in pre-trial detention, he chose to plead guilty and spent nine weeks in jail before returning to the UK to continue his university studies.

The report said the EAW regime should be reformed to require states issuing or executing the warrants ‘to consider the proportionality of extradition’ and take into account ‘risks to fundamental rights’.

States that issue EAWs should also be required to withdraw them if they are refused by an executing state, and legal advice and representation should always be available to the accused, the report recommends.

The report said: ‘Despite our serious concerns about the operation of the EAW, we recognise the need for an efficient system of extradition… Unfortunately, there has not been sufficient assessment of the human and financial costs of this "no questions asked" regime.’

EAWs were introduced in 2004 to provide a fast-track extradition system so that suspects could quickly be returned to the country where they had offended for trial.