DEVIL’S ISLAND.

Waikato Times, Volume 110, Issue 18433, 14 September 1931, Page 6

DEVIL’S ISLAND.

The Privy Council has found it possible in terms of Britain’s extradition treaties to order the release of the three prisoners who escaped from the French penal settlement of Devil’s Island and reached Trinidad in a small boat. It is only recently .that British law has permitted the surrender of escaped prisoners under any circumstances. There was a famous case last century of a shipload of Spanish convicts who had the luck to be wrecked on one of the Bahamas and who were set at liberty because the law of England did not permit of their return to Spain. Since then treaties of extradition have modified- what used to be Britain’s invariable rule, but the poor wretches who have now regained their freedom are apparently not affeoted by the change. How those who recently escaped to Venezuela will fare is a matter of conjecture. Until comparatively recently that country had no extradition law and It was, In fact, the only place In the world where escaped prisoners were safe from recapture. This sanctuary was lost when the republic joined other countries in making extradition legal. The interpretation of the extradition laws also enters into the caso of the British subject arrested in New Zealand recently for the alleged theft of bank funds in Colombia, Humane sentiment the world over would be better satisfied if penal settlements In general' were abolished. They afford too easy a method of relieving the public conscience of further care for the prisoner. Much as the Turks consigned the unwanted pariahs of Stamboul to an island in the Sea of. Marmora, where they could starve and rot without offending the susceptibilities of the community, so do some civilised States to-day continue to consign their prisoners to arctic or tropical penal areas where press and publlo can conveniently forget their suffering. The truth about sucli places is hard to come by, but if the most recent account can be trusted—that in “Devil’s Island," by Mr Allison Booth, an American sailor who was stranded there —the record of brutality and torture is such as none can read without horror and no Frenchman without a sense of grave responsibility.