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35 Crim. L.F. 1 (2024)

handle is hein.journals/crimlfm35 and id is 1 raw text is: Criminal Law Forum (2024) 35:1-37 © The Author(s) 2023 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10609-023-09476-6 DIRK VAN ZYL SMIT* and CHRISTOPHER SEEDS EXTRADITION AND WHOLE LIFE SENTENCES Accepted: 28 October 2023; Published online: 12 December 2023 ABSTRACT. Sentences of life imprisonment without a prospect of adequate review and release are prohibited in States party to the European Convention on Human Rights. Should the same principle apply when extradition is sought to States not party to the Convention? In Sanchez Sanchez v United Kingdom (2022), the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights applied a less strict standard for potential extraditees facing life without parole. We analyse this decision and its repercussions in light of the history of international cooperation in extreme pun- ishment cases between Europe and the USA and recent interpretations of the new standard. The article concludes with an assessment of the level of proof litigants must present to satisfy the Sanchez Sanchez test and of how the law could continue to prevent inhuman and degrading treatment of extraditees facing life sentences. I INTRODUCTION In all but 33 countries in the world, the State has the power to imprison persons until they die, and this power is regarded as a legitimate means of punishing serious crimes.1 In Europe, however, the law has increasingly recognised that if such an exercise of power is untrammelled, it is open to abuse. Accordingly, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) holds that prisoners serving life sen- tences, while enjoying no right to release, must nevertheless have a prospect of release coupled with a clear process for determining whether penological justifications support continued imprisonment. Failure to meet these requirements, the Grand Chamber of the * Dirk van Zyl Smit, Emeritus Professor of Comparative and International Penal Law, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK. E-mail: dirk.vanzylsmit@ uct.ac..za. Dirk van Zyl Smit, Emeritus Professor of Criminology and Senior Re- search Scholar, University of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa.Dirk van Zyl Smit gratefully acknowledges the financial support of the Leverhulme Trust, which granted him a Leverhulme emeritus fellowship (EM-2021-034) in 2021-2023, and of the South African National Research Foundation (Grant 150054). ** Christopher Seeds, Department of Criminology, Law & Society, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA. E-mail: cseeds@uci.edu. D van Zyl Smit and C Appleton, Life Imprisonment a Global Human Rights Analysis (Harvard University Press 2019), xiii.