As Sir John Thomas made clear in his judgment, this was the real problem in some of these cases. "There may be real dangers," he said, "in the structure of a scheme which not only has a statutory appeal procedure but which has become complicated by judicial review proceedings which can be used to reopen or raise again issues that have already been decided."

As the court said, there needed to be finality. And "a necessary part of finality in litigation is that all parts of a case should be raised on the first occasion on which they properly can be raised." He was not impressed by lawyers who waited until one door had closed before seeking to open another.

How, then, can we speed up the process? It would not be realistic to expect thedomestic courts to act as quickly as they did at the beginning of October; they do not have the resources, particularly when points of law are being raised for the first time. There are prospects of speeding up cases in Strasbourg, but the applications by Abu Hamza and the other terrorist suspects required the court to investigate conditions at US maximum-security prisons, adding to the time taken. 

The answer, as Thomas suggests, is for our own courts not to allow extradition cases to ping-pong between the Home Office and the courts. The whole point of the Extradition Act 2003 was to remove the Home Secretary's discretion and make it less likely that the minister's decisions would be subject to judicial review.