Sir David Davis has said he will campaign to get the US-UK extradition treaty abolished in memory of Mike Lynch.
The MP revealed Mr Lynch contacted him after he had been found not guilty to say ‘we’re going to have to defeat this treaty’.
Speaking on GB News Sir David Davis said: “They were celebrating what they thought would be the end of a long injustice, the 12 year injustice in which Mike was dragged through the courts time and time again when he had to defend his good name.
“When Autonomy was bought, it was actually quoted on the London Stock Exchange. So everybody was involved in the valuation of this, not just Mike. And Mike didn't put it up for sale.
“In fact, what happened between the purchase of Autonomy and the change of mind, was that a complete change of Management at Hewlett Packard took place, and they threw out the old management and brought in new ones.
“And the new one, I won't name the individuals, wanted to make their name rebuilding Hewlett Packard.
“So what happened was basically British justice got ensnared in American commercial politics.
“And it's not for the first time, as this has happened a number of times. There was what was known as the NatWest Five.
“But in each case, when these people are dragged off to America, what happens is they fall under the American plea bargaining system, and in essence, they are threatened. They're told, if you plead not guilty and you lose, you'll go to prison for 25 or 30 years in a high security prison, you'll probably never see your family again, almost never see your family again.
“Or you can plead guilty and will do a deal for two or three years in an open prison, maybe the second half is served back in Britain and so on.
“So most people, faced with this prospect, will give in. And really, really unusually, Mike didn’t. Mike was incredibly brave. He basically said, I'm not going to fold in front of this blackmail, and I'm going to fight it.
“And only a small percentage, one or two percent of people, who resist American court cases are exonerated. The vast majority are found guilty one way or another.
“And he fought that off, and he was very lucky. He got a good jury, as he said himself, he got a good, honest jury who saw the facts and exonerated it on all counts.
“There wasn't a halfway measure about it. He was exonerated. This is a terrible thing to put a British citizen through, an absolutely terrible thing, and it doesn't amount to justice.
“And the reason it was done in the first place back in 2003 remember, this was just after 9/11 and so Blair was trying to be to bend over backwards to be supportive to George Bush, I guess, at the time and and conceded all these arrangements whereby you didn't have to prove a prima facie case.
“We've had hundreds of Brits [extradited], and very, very few of them, I think only about a dozen of them have actually been terrorism cases. The vast majority have been commercial cases of one sort or another, rather like this one.
“And so what's happened is that British law has become a sort of outbuilding of American commercial policy. The American legal system is very politicised and you have elected district attorneys and things like that.
“But there's no reason that we have to follow that. We've decided to, in these cases, but the French don't. Plenty of European countries have constitutional rights for their own citizens that protect them.
“In reverse, the Americans have constitutional rights.
“Shouldn't British citizens have constitutional rights too, like a right to a fair trial, a right to a presumption of innocence?
“The other thing about American court cases is they often start with the so-called perp walk, where the the accused person is dressed up in an orange suit, shackled hand and foot and then walked to the walk to the court so that all the TV cameras can catch them, just to present them as guilty rather than the exact opposite of what we presume in our legal system.
“We need to get a grip of this now. Mike, when he'd won his case, almost the first thing he did was ring me up and say, ‘We're going to have to defeat this treaty, we're going to have to overcome this treaty and get it changed but the better.’
“So I view it as a sort of duty of care to his memory really that I'm going to actually maintain that campaign to get it abolished.”
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