India and the United Kingdom (UK) on Wednesday agreed to improve processes to speedily extradite wanted people, which includes liquor baron Vijay Mallya.
The issue was raised during the first Home Affairs Dialogue between both the countries when delegations led by Home Secretary Rajiv Mehrishi and UK's Second Permanent Secretary (Home Office) Patsy Wilkinson met here.
While the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) maintained that individual cases like that of Mallya was not discussed, an official statement said both sides expressed "satisfaction in matters relating to extradition of wanted persons".
"The process involved in matters of extradition and the need to further improve them were also discussed," the statement said.
Briefing media about the talks, MHA Advisor Ashok Prasad individual cases do not come up at this level where policies and procedures are fine-tuned. He said the "bottlenecks" in the processes were discussed.
"The laws laid are very clear. We cannot short circuit judicial process. In the UK, there are issues about death penalty, issues related to quality of prisons, which will be raised by the defence. The idea was to reduce process to ensure that process can finish in a finite time," he said.
The UK has initiated the extradition process of Mallya with a court now slated to start hearing the extradition plea on May 18.
On the cooperation on anti- terrorism mechanism and to strengthen mutual support to check cyber crimes, both sides agreed to formalise these arrangements.
They also discussed the issue of presence of Sikh militants in the UK and sharing of intelligence inputs on real-time during the two-hour long meeting.
Acknowledging the challenges of illegal migrants, the two countries decided to work together to ensure smooth return of Indians overstaying in UK subject to nationality verification.
"Regarding criminal data sharing and strengthening cooperation in tackling serious and organised crimes, the two sides expressed their satisfaction in the existing level of cooperation. Both sides also agreed to enhance and strengthen further the bilateral cooperation and work towards formalising the arrangements," the statement said.
India also raised the contentious issue of visa related difficulties faced by Indian students, skilled professional and dependents of Indian diplomats.
Prasad said the UK side assured that this would be looked into and they mentioned that it has been their constant endeavour to improve the visa process to promote people to people exchanges that exist between the two countries.
Published 04 May 2017, 08:25 IST