JUDGMENT

Lord Justice Leggatt:

The applicant, Lorrain Esme Osman, is in course of making his fourth application to this Court in connection with his resistance to a request from the Government of Hong Kong for his extradition on charges of fraud. His latest substantive application is for habeas corpus under the provisions of the Extradition Act 1989.

He has been committed to custody pursuant to an order made on 1 June 1987 under s. 7(5) of the Fugitive Offencers Act 1967 by the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate in respect of 42 alleged offences of conspiracy to defraud and steal, theft, false accounting and other offences of dishonesty covering a period between 1979 and 1983. He has been in custody for a period of over four and a half years, since 6 December 1985, when he was arrested on a provisional warrant.

In essence the applicant submits that it would be unjust and oppressive to return him to Hong Kong for trial because of the location, because of his race, he being a Malaysian national, because of the adverse publicity, because of the delay, and because the accusation is not made in good faith in the interest of justice, the latter complaint being the one which for present purposes is material.

This application is for an order that the Hong Kong Government and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office produce for inspection by the Court various documents listed in two schedules appended to the notice of motion, and for a letter of request in relation to a Hong Kong witness called Philip Layton.

In the second of the two schedules to which I have referred the applicant specifies two classes of documents which he claims should be produced by the Hong Kong Government or by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office for inspection by the Court. The first such class relates to documents dealing with the investigation, prosecution and extradition of the applicant passing between the Hong Kong Government, either directly or through the Attorney-General's chambers, the United Kingdom High Commissioner in Malaysia and the Malaysian Government; and the second class is of documents of the same kind passing between the United Kingdom Government, the Hong Kong Government, either directly or through the Attorney-General's chambers, and the Malaysian Government.

The documents which are the subject of the first schedule are explained in a supporting affirmation by the applicant of 9 April 1990, in which he says that his habeas corpus application is based upon facts revealed as a result of the disclosure by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on 21 October 1989 of confidential telexes passing between the Hong Kong Government, the High Commissioner in Malaysia, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. According to the applicant those documents reveal a strong prima facie case that the accusations against him were not made in good faith in the interests of justice.

He points to the fact that the documents in schedule 1 of the notice of motion fall into three categories. The first consists of documents referred to in the confidential telex messages which were disclosed on his previous application for habeas corpus . The second category concerns the involvement of a person called Warwick Reid in the granting to immunity to a person called Ibrahim Jaafar, who is the chief prosecution witness against the applicant.

The applicant affirms that Mr. Reid was recently deported by the Philippines Government for travelling on false documents and sent back to Hong Kong where he is said to be in the custody of the Independent Commission against Corruption to which I shall refer as ICAC.

The applicant says, and invites the Court to adopt the point of view, that by virtue of Mr. Reid's initial flight, his conduct in the services of the Crown in the Attorney-General's office may be presumed to be corrupt. Mr. Thomas, who appears in this Court for the applicant, has told the Court that, in consequence of a plea of guilty, Mr. Reid now stands convicted of an offence,