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What is the most visited country in the world?
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This week we find out what the most visited country in the world is and ask why they...
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Thank you for downloading from the BBC. For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to bbcworldserveys.com podcasts
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hello, and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. This week, we show how numbers can shed light on the web of international politics that surrounds extradition. But first, for many people, the holiday season's arrived, which means we, the More or Less team, thought we'd get the deck check, kick back and we'll see what the data says about where everyone else is going. And it's France. Pleasingly, we've discovered this through a measuring tool that's new to the programme, the United Nations World Tourism Barometer. It ranks the 50 most visited tourist destinations according to statistics it gets from national tourist boards and the like. And France comes top. Ben Carter's here.
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83 million people visited the country last year, comfortably outstripping its population of 66 million. And that's 16 million more visitors than the United States in second place, with China, Spain and Italy completing the top five most visited countries.
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Yet despite its overwhelming popularity as a holiday destination, it comes top year after year. It seems that the French have a problem convincing visitors to part with their cash. The US makes by far the most money from tourists, about $125 billion. And that's more than twice what France makes, around 50 billion.
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And if you look at how much France is earning per tourist, it does even worse. It's about $650. Tourists visiting the UK spend twice that, and visitors to the US spend almost three times as much. In fact, the average amount of money visitors to France spend lags way behind every other country in the top 10 most visited chart bar Russia. And by the way, all those numbers are dwarfed by visitors to Macau, the Far east gambling centre, which is where they each spend a staggering $3,200.
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But what can France do to cash in on its popularity? Francois Navarro from Ile de France Regional Tourist Authority says encouraging people to make more of Paris is key, because at the moment, the average stay there is less than three nights.
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People stay 2.7 nights in Paris. This is an average figure. We know that European countries stay two nights and we know that Asian people or people from America stay more than one week. Our objective is to make visitors stay longer in Paris because the longer they stay in Paris, the most money they spend. Accommodation, restaurants, shopping. So we want to organize huge events. Olympic Games. That's an objective for us, for example. But also each time we open a new Museum. That's very important for us because we know that people will stay longer to visit this museum.
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Francois Navarro from the Ile de France Tourist Board. You might think that if France is the most visited country in the world, then Paris would be the most visited capital, but it's not. According to figures gathered by MasterCard, it's actually Bangkok. It's estimated that the Thai capital is currently attracting almost 16 million visitors a year, narrowly ahead of London. Now, the international politics of extradition has been highlighted by a number of stories in the news. And we've discovered that a look at the numbers can be instructive. After an extradition hearing lasting weeks, it's been decided that Srian Dhavane, a British man suspected of murdering his wife Annie on honeymoon, is to be sent to South Africa to face trial. And the figures show this is an unusual case. This is the first time an African country has successfully asked the UK to send over a suspect over the past decade. Extradition is also rare the other way round. The UK's asked Africa for just 16 people. And what about that other major extradition case in the news? The United States wants Russia to hand over a young American, Edward Snowden, who's wanted on charges of leaking details of government surveillance programs. The situation shows how complex a web international treaties are, and controversial. For example, the arrangement between the US and the UK has been causing complaint for years. In 2011, the British government's Commons Home Affairs Select Committee said the UK was losing faith in the treaty, which came into force almost a decade ago, because they said it was easier to extradite a British citizen to the USA than vice versa. But as Ben Carter and I have been discovering, the numbers paint a different picture.
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Let's start with the number of requests made by both countries. Since the treaty came into force in 2004, the United States has made 130 requests to the UK. The UK's made 54, less than half.
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So the US looks like the bigger
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beast, and of course it is. Its population is about five times the size of the UK's, so you'd expect
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to see the US making many more requests.
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And proportionately, the difference between the two used to be even greater. As Ted Bromond from the Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom think tank in Washington D.C. told me, this is one of
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the points that the treaty critics never seem to pay much attention to, and I think it's a fairly significant one. They will tend to look at the number of cases between the US and the UK since 2003 under this new treaty, and say, oh, the UK is getting the short end of the stick. Well, okay, let's go back before the treaty and see how things look then. If you take the 30 years From 1964 to 1994, under the old treaty, the US filed 301 extradition requests in Britain, and Britain filed only 108 in the United States. So the ratio Then was about 3 to 1, whereas now it's about 2.5 to 1. So by that standard, we would think a lot of people would actually like the new treaty because the ratio is actually moving in Britain's favor.
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Ted Broman there. And what you've also got to consider is how many of these requests are granted. The US has returned 38 of the 54 people requested to the UK. That's 70%. The UK, by comparison, has returned 73 of the people requested by the US only 56%.
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So proportionally speaking, the UK has been getting more people returned to face justice than the US has.
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But if you want to see big numbers, you want to look at European arrest warrants. These came into Force in 2004 with the aim of removing red tape and speeding the process up.
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For example, the year before the new system came into place, there were just over 100 extradition requests made to the UK, while the UK itself made just fewer than 100 requests to other countries. There wasn't a big difference.
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Compare that to the number of European arrest warrants the UK now executes for its neighbours. It's a lot, as Anand Dube, an extradition lawyer from the firm Peterson Peters,
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outlines in terms of European arrest warrants, which the UK has executed by arresting people, you're probably talking for each of the last two or three years in the region of 1200, 1300, 1400, about that region. Whereas the UK tends to issue each year about 200 European arrest warrant. So you can see that there is a disparity in terms of the numbers issued and the numbers executed. And you have to remember that the UK may issue a couple of hundred requests, but that doesn't necessarily mean they all get executed, because it depends then upon the persons who are the subject to the request being found in other EU member states.
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But if you want to know about the kings of extradition, it's the Polish. To give you an idea, Poland made 845 requests to the UK last year.
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And some of the arrest warrants it issues have attracted criticism. Late last year, a Polish man spent two months in a prison in London because the Polish authorities had issued a warrant demanding he serve the remainder of a 12 month prison sentence served in Poland in 2005 for being drunk on a bike.
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And we know of another warrant issued over the theft of a wheelbarrow. Why? Oh, why? Anand Duve explains.
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Poland makes a large number of requests throughout the EU because it operates what's called the principle of legality. And that means that within the Polish legal system, if it can prosecute an offence, it does. There's no assessment as to the severity of the offence or what effects it may have had on the victims or how long ago the offence may have taken place. The Polish system doesn't have any tolerance built in for those issues. It simply operates on the basis that if it can prosecute an offence, it will do so, and it's extended that internationally. So it then also will issue a European arrest warrant in every case where it's prosecuting domestically.
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Extradition lawyer Anand Dube. If there are any numbers you'd like us to take a closer look at, do email us. Our address is more or lessbc.co.uk and you can also sign up for a free download of our programme at our website, bbcworldservice.com more or less.
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