It was just a delivery job. Now the lorry driver faces years in jail without a trial

James Dormer left home last December to drive to Greece, as he had on numerous occasions. With him, and his consignment of Dr Martens boots, was his girlfriend, Jacqui. She liked to go with him to make sure he ate properly and to keep him company.

They took their cab, which they had bought with help from Jacqui's elderly mother when she remortgaged her house. The trucking provided an income for all of them, and covered the mortgage payments. See you before Christmas, he told his daughter, before they left.

Now, six weeks later, James Dormer, 46, and Jacqui Rose, 50, are languishing in separate prisons in Greece, accused of what the Greek authorities have classified as "grand theft". They are unlikely to receive a trial date before September. The truck is in Athens, impounded by the Greek authorities.

Back in Hackney, north London, Cheryl, Mr Dormer's 23-year-old daughter, is trying to work out how to tell Jacqui's elderly mother that, in the absence of any income, she may well lose the house where she has lived since she was 20.

"Dad was going to pick the trailer up from Dover and drive over to Greece. I was expecting them home any day," Cheryl said. "Then just before Christmas I received a call from him to say they'd been arrested. My dad was crying, he was really emotional."

According to the British Embassy in Athens, Mr Dormer was arrested when he came to deliver his third consignment of the boots and a large number of them were discovered to be missing. The value of the goods, put at pounds 40,000, means that bail is unlikely.

According to Cheryl, who recently sent her father pounds 600 to enable him to make the telephone calls from his prison on an island off the mainland, both are distraught. "The last time he saw Jacqui she had dirt on her face and was handcuffed and being led off. He hasn't been able to change his clothes. All their stuff is in the lorry, which has been impounded," she said.

"He's just cracking up. He's worried about Jacqui. He's not eating properly. It's difficult to cope with that sort of thing when you're their age," she added.

Mr Dormer and Ms Rose say they are innocent. They believe the consignment must have been stolen from Dover, before they picked it up. Their representative in Britain, Stephen Jakobi of Fair Trials Abroad, wonders why someone would attempt to deliver a load they had allegedly stolen.

He says there would be a simple way of checking whether they had "offloaded" some on the way: the lorry would have stopped at weigh-stations along their European route. However, collection of evidence between EU countries could take years. "The problem is not a straightforward one because of the need for international evidence as to the possibility of the goods having been missing at an earlier stage," Mr Jakobi said.

"Work will presumably will have to be done in Greece, Italy, France and England and they will need separate requests to separate ministries of justice via the Greek Ministry of Justice. Our record for this kind of thing is two and a half years."

Official requests from courts for evidence from other countries within the European Union take often unacceptable lengths of time or are ignored. Mr Jakobi points to a "chorus" of complaints from French lawyers and judges about the way official requests from their courts appear to be ignored or delayed. Often this leads to the accused spending "unacceptable" lengths of time in remand.

A previous client, Josephine Conn, a grandmother, spent two years on remand in France on soft-drugs charges, much of it awaiting replies from Spanish authorities to a request from the French court for assistance in the investigation.

A spokesman for the British Embassy in Athens, which is monitoring the couple, said the case was an unusual one. She said that the lawyer for Ms Rose, who was originally charged with complicity, was going to make an application for her to be released on bail, but it was unlikely that she would be returning to Britain.

"As well as finding the money, the problem is whether she would be allowed to leave the country, and if not, how she would support herself until the trial," she said.

Last year the Home Office handled 2,540 requests for evidence from countries within the EU, and 3,707 world-wide. A spokesman said that while some could take a couple of weeks to process, others could take many months.