“’Unjust’ I regard as directed primarily to the risk of prejudice to the accused in the conduct of the trial itself, ‘oppressive’ as directed to hardship to the accused resulting from changes in his circumstances that have occurred during the period to be taken into consideration; but there is room for overlapping, and between them they would cover all cases where to return him would not be fair. Delay in the commencement or conduct of extradition proceedings which is brought about by the accused himself by fleeing the country, concealing his whereabouts or evading arrest cannot, in my view, be relied upon as a ground for holding it to be either unjust or oppressive to return him. Any difficulties that he may encounter in the conduct of his defence in consequence of the delay due to such causes are of his own choice and making. Save in the most exceptional circumstances it would be neither unjust nor oppressive that he should be required to accept them.”
“The reasons for the delay and the consequences of the delay were part of the circumstances that the Minister was bound to have regard to in deciding whether it was just, after all this time, to uproot this citizen and send him to another country to face his trial. In leaving those matters to the foreign court he failed to give sufficient regard to the applicant's rights and to the protection that the extradition process was intended to afford him. In so acting, he failed to take into account matters which the statutory question required him to take into account, and so clearly misdirected himself. The reason he gives for that is that the ‘lapse of time’ was ‘not such as would make it inappropriate’ to leave those matters to the American court. We find that quite startling. Of the reported cases only R. v. Secretary of State for the home Department ex parte Sinclair ([1992] Imm. AR 293) rivals this case in length of delay. If it is not appropriate in this case for the Minister to consider the reasons for and consequences of such delay, how many years are necessary? Wherever law is practised, justice is reproached by delay. There is a real danger that those of us who have spent a lifetime in the law become enured to delay. So too laymen associate the law with delay, and their expectation of it may harden them to the fact of it. So the years trip off the tongue and so we reach a position where a citizen may be surrendered to face trial in another state for matters at least nine years stale without examination of the reasons for the length of that delay or the consequences of it.”