University of Waikato legal academic Professor Neil Boister has been granted the New Zeland Law Foundation International Research Fellowship valued at up to $125,000.

He was presented with the award in Wellington on 4 December 2015. The fellowship is awarded annually to enable an individual of outstanding ability to undertake legal research that will make a significant contribution to New Zealand.

 
Professor Neil Boister.

Professor Boister's research project is entitled "The simplification of New Zealand's law of extradition".

The project will critically evaluate New Zealand's extradition law in light of its international commitments to cooperate in extradition and selected extradition regimes that have been developed at a regional and global level.

"The objective of the project is to determine whether New Zealand's extradition law provides an acceptable basis for the extradition of individuals to and from New Zealand," Professor Boister says.

"The yardsticks against which acceptability will be measured are the necessity for effective international cooperation against crime, balanced against the necessity of respecting the human rights of the individuals subject to the extradition process."

The project will involve analysis of the domestic, international and comparative legal frameworks for extradition. 

It will also involve an extensive schedule of interviews of extradition lawyers (both prosecution and defence), global criminal justice policy experts, academic experts, and human rights critics of extradition in Canada, the United States, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, the EU, England, and Scotland to try to isolate what they think the technical and conceptual problems are with the current global trends in extradition law. These will be carried out in a series of research trips to North America and Europe.