By Isabelle Yr Carlsson
COPENHAGEN (Reuters) -A Danish court said on Thursday it had rejected a request by India for the extradition of a Danish national wanted over a 1995 weapons smuggling case, citing the risk of human rights breaches.
India has for years sought to have Niels Holck extradited to stand trial on suspicion of supplying a West Bengal rebel group with around four tons of weapons.
Sending Holck to India would violate Denmark’s extradition act due to a risk that he would be subjected to treatment in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights, the court ruled.
Public prosecutor Anders Rechendorff, who last year nominated Holck for a handover to stand trial in India, told Reuters it had yet to be decided whether the decision would be appealed.
“The guarantees India has provided are not valid,” defence lawyer Jonas Christoffersen told Reuters.
“It’s been six years of negotiating the conditions between the public prosecutor and India. Now the court says that his safety can’t be guaranteed,” Christoffersen said.
Holck previously admitted in a Danish court that he was onboard a Russian cargo plane with six others, smuggling weapons into West Bengal in December, 1995. At the time he was known by the alias Kim Davy.
The arms were intended for people associated with Ananda Marga, a rebel movement that, according to Holck, needed weapons to defend against soldiers of the communist party in power in West Bengal at the time, Christoffersen said.
However, the weapons landed elsewhere than planned and were discovered by the Indian authorities, who prosecuted and imprisoned the whole crew in India, except for Holck who escaped to Nepal and returned to Denmark in 1996.
The trial in Denmark did not rule on whether Holck is innocent or not, but whether the criteria of the extradition law were fulfilled, according to the Danish public prosecutor.
(Reporting by Isabelle Yr Carlsson; editing by Jacob Gronholt-Pedersen, Terje Solsvik and Angus MacSwan)
