T&T’’s High Court permanently halt efforts to extradite Jack Warner to America

Former FIFA vice-president Jack Warner has won a landmark legal victory after more than a decade of extradition proceedings, as Trinidad and Tobago’s (T& T’s) High Court has ordered a permanent halt to his extradition to the United States.

The court also ruled that the State violated his constitutional rights by unlawfully pursuing the case. In a 71-page judgment delivered on Friday, Madame Justice Karen Reid found that the continuation of the extradition proceedings breached Warner’s constitutional rights after the Authority to Proceed (ATP), which initiated the extradition process, was issued without the legal safeguards required under T&T’s Extradition (Commonwealth and Foreign Territories) Act.

The judge further found that the Office of the Attorney General repeatedly misled the courts by representing that a special or “bespoke” arrangement existed between Trinidad and Tobago and the United States to protect Warner under the international “speciality rule”, when in fact no such arrangement existed.

Extradition proceedings permanently stayed 

Justice Reid ordered that the extradition proceedings against Warner be permanently stayed, awarded him damages for the breaches of his constitutional rights and directed the Attorney General to pay his legal costs, certified fit for both Senior and Junior Counsel.

The assessment of damages has been fixed for a case management conference on September 30, 2026. Central to Warner’s constitutional claim was the “speciality rule”, a long-established principle of extradition law which provides that a person surrendered to another country can only be prosecuted for the offences for which extradition was granted.

Under Section 8(3) of the Extradition (Commonwealth and Foreign Territories) Act, an Authority to Proceed cannot lawfully be issued unless adequate speciality protections are in place. The judge found that no such arrangement existed when the ATP was issued in September 2015.

The court declared that issuing the Authority to Proceed in those circumstances breached Warner’s constitutional rights. The judge also ruled that the Attorney General’s representatives repeatedly represented before the High Court, Court of Appeal and even the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council that a bespoke speciality arrangement had been negotiated specifically for Warner’s extradition.

No such arrangement had ever existed 

However, evidence obtained through a Freedom of Information request in 2023 revealed that no such arrangement had ever existed and that the State had relied solely on the general provisions of the existing extradition treaty with the United States. Justice Reid was critical of the conduct of the Office of the Attorney General.

While the court accepted that the original misunderstanding may not have been deliberate, it found that once the State became aware that no bespoke arrangement existed, it had a duty to correct the record. Instead, the judgment declared, the State continued allowing the courts to proceed on a false premise.

The judge held that this amounted to a serious breach of the State’s duty of candour and constituted an abuse of the court’s process. She further found that positive representations were made before the Privy Council asserting the existence of a bespoke arrangement when none existed.

According to the judgment, this conduct deprived Warner of an effective legal remedy and resulted in an arbitrary and fundamentally unfair exercise of State power.