Joshua Rozenberg’s view that there is ‘nothing to be gained by an arrest of someone who is never going to be prosecuted’ may be good legal analysis but it lacks political sense (see [2010] Gazette, 18 March, 8).

Immediate legal action may sometimes shame the state into doing something which – as in the case of Israeli officials – it would do anything to avoid. Would Pinochet have been arrested in Britain but for the initial action of an entirely independent Spanish prosecutor? To restrict the issuing of warrants concerning universal jurisdiction offences entirely to the CPS sounds too much like kicking the whole topic into very long grass.

Roger Sceats, Solicitor, Surbiton