Extradition from Britain to Israel—Haephrati

A husband and wife team of hackers will be extradited from Britain to Israel after they withdrew their appeal.^[1] Michael Haephrati and his wife, Ruth Brier-Haephrati, are accused in Israel of developing a Trojan Horse program for use in industrial espionage.^[2] Last year, it is alleged, the couple hacked into “scores of computers in Israel, including computers belonging to large and leading companies,” from their residences in Britain and Germany.^[3] The Trojan Horse program acted as a type of spyware that “extracted computer files and entire directories from infected computers” which were then sent to servers in Israel and other countries.^[4] The program was sold to private investigators who offered industrial espionage services to various companies; those companies are currently being investigated in Israel, but “prosecutors are struggling to indict the companies that ordered the business information, due to the legal difficulties in proving that they that the information was obtained by illegal means.”^[5]

They were arrested in May of 2005, and in July, Israel formally requested their extradition.^[6] They were ordered to be extradited two months later, and Home Secretary Clarke signed the extradition order.^[7]

The Haephrati’s case highlights the increasingly global nature of criminal investigations, including the expansion of countries’ extraterritorial jurisdiction; all of “their criminal acts were allegedly carried out in Europe,” and the Israeli Ministry of Justice “stresses that cross-border crime in an era when acts committed in one country constitute crimes in another can only be fought against by effective international cooperation.”^[8]

Extradition from Britain to Israel is governed by an agreement signed in 1960^[9] and two exchanges of notes, one done in 1978,^[10] and the other done in 1996.^[11] It is the latter exchange of notes which governs extradition in this case. That exchange of notes concerned the applicability of the European Convention on Extradition of 1957, which establishes a dual-criminality rubric for extradition.^[12]

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[1] Noam Sharvit, Trojan Horse Developers to be Extradited to Israel Soon, Globes Online, Jan. 17, 2006.
[2] Id.
[3] Id.
[4] Id.
[5] Id.
[6] Id.
[7] Id.
[8] Id.
[9] See Extradition Agreement, Apr. 4, 1960, U.K.-Isr., TS 77/1960 Cmnd 1223.
[10] Exchange of Notes, Aug. 16, 1978, U.K..-Isr., TS 99/1978 Cmnd 7375.
[11] Exchange of Notes, Feb. 14, 1996, U.K.-Isr., TS 38/2000 Cm 4668.
[12] European Convention on Extradition, Dec. 13, 1957, art. 2, para. 1, ETS No. 024.