Extradition issue: Interpol is preparing international arrest warrants for the three Irishmen who are on the run after being sentenced to 17 years in a Colombian prison for training Marxist rebels in terror tactics.
"We presume that perhaps they're no longer in the country, that they left illegally through some point on the border or with false documents," said Mr Victor Cruz, director of Interpol in Colombia.
Mr Cruz said Interpol was co-ordinating with the Colombian justice system to issue international arrest warrants for James Monaghan, Niall Connolly and Martin McCauley, which would be circulated among 182 countries.
If, as now seems likely, the three men have gone on the run, legal experts believe that their main prospect of security from being sent back to serve their 17- year jail terms would be to find a country without an extradition treaty with Bogota and to seek to live there legally. Ireland has no extradition treaty with Colombia and leading lawyers yesterday warned that any attempt to extradite the three republicans from anywhere in the EU could run into serious difficulties under human rights law.
However, lawyers warned that if the men were found to be living illegally in a country, they could possibly face deportation rather than extradition.
And in such circumstances there would be no guarantee that the three would be sent back to Ireland. They could, in theory, be deported to Colombia.
Prof William Schabas, the director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at NUI Galway, told The Irish Times last night that if the three men were apprehended anywhere in Europe, any attempted extradition to Colombia was likely to face lengthy challenges all the way to the European Court of Human Rights.
He suggested that these challenges would be based on allegations that the system of justice in Colombia was dysfunctional.
He said the US State Department, in a report for 2003, had found that the civilian judiciary in Colombia was "undermined by corruption and intimidation".
Prof Schabas said one difficulty faced by the Colombian authorities in securing the extradition of the three republicans from wherever they might be found was the necessity of having an extradition treaty in place.
He said the general rule was that without a treaty there would be no extradition.
The Department of Foreign Affairs said last night that there was currently no extradition treaty in place between Ireland and Colombia.
Prof Schabas said that he did not know how many reciprocal extradition arrangements the Colombian government had in place.
However, he said that historically the Colombian authorities had been reluctant to extradite their own nationals and that this had been a long-standing source of tension between the United States and the government in Bogota.
He said that only this week the Colombian authorities had refused to hand over a leading paramilitary leader wanted on drug-related charges by Washington.
The Colombian President, Mr Alvaro Uribe, said on Thursday that he would not extradite the country's top right-wing paramilitary leader, Salvatore Mancuso, to the US provided he ceased all illegal activities and remained in peace talks.
However The New York Times reported earlier this month that there was a growing willingness on the part of the Colombian government to extradite its citizens, wanted for alleged drug trafficking, to the United States and that this had led to the development of closer links with Washington in recent times.
The newspaper maintained that President Uribe's willingness to extradite "has made him President Bush's closest ally in a region marked by rising anti-American sentiment".
Prof Dermot Walsh, director of the Centre for Criminal Justice at the University of Limerick, said he believed if the three men were apprehended that deportation was a more likely outcome.
