THE Lord Advocate of Scotland will have to go to the Supreme Court in London and beg permission to bring them the case of Zain Taj Dean, the businessman who killed a man in Taiwan in a car smash and whose extradition has been refused by the Scottish courts because of conditions in Taiwanese prisons.
Lord Advocate James Wolffe QC was yesterday considering whether to appeal to the Supreme Court against the verdict of the Appeal Court, Scotland’s highest court of criminal justice, that the Crown should not be given permission to take the case to the Supreme Court under “devolution issues.”
The case is front page news in Taiwan, as he was the first extradition case from Britain to that country.
The businessman of Indian heritage has been vilified as absconding from justice, after he was given a four-year jail sentence in 2012 for killing a delivery driver in a road accident.
In a unique deal, the Scottish Government had said that Zain Dean could be extradited if prison conditions were similar to that in Scotland.
The High Court of Justiciary’s Appeal Court had already ruled that the extradition of Zain Dean to Taiwan would be incompatible with article three of the European Convention on Human Rights as a result of the conditions in Taipei prison, the only place he could be held.
Lawyers for Dean argued that Taipei prison suffered from extreme overcrowding and the staff to prisoner ratio was very low. They told the Appeal Court he could be submitted to a regime where sexual abuse, violence and suicide were all very much present and that there was a ‘cell-captain culture’ in which the strong ruled the weak. The court was told there were insufficient medical facilities and his notoriety was an additional problem in this case.
Dean was well-known and vilified in Taiwan and the special conditions proposed for his accommodation had caused further outrage in the local media.
The Appeal court split on the original verdict that Dean’s extradition was a breach of his human rights, and it has split 2-1 again.
Senator of the College of Justice Lady Paton stated: “In the view of the majority, the facts with which this case is concerned are quite unique. “Any other extradition treaty entered into by the Taiwanese authorities may be wholly different, involving different parties, different terms and a different factual background. It may be that, in such future treaties, article three of the European Convention on Human Rights would not apply.”
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