Extradition (Provisional Arrest) Bill [Lords]

Andrew Mitchell Excerpts

Report stage & Committee stage & Committee: 1st sitting & Committee: 1st sitting: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 8th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con)]

Let me start by agreeing entirely with what was said by my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith); he has argued forcefully that we should not extradite to China and Hong Kong, giving powerful humanitarian and human rights reasons, and he is right on every count.

Our extradition arrangements with the United States are not anything like as divisive as those with China and Hong Kong, but they remain deeply imbalanced and can lead to serious miscarriages of justice. As it stands, the Bill would allow individuals in the United Kingdom who are to be extradited to a list of specified countries to be arrested without a warrant. My amendments 7, 8, 9 and 10 would remove the United States from that list of countries, and I shall speak to those amendments now.

The Government say that they need the powers in this Bill because of suspects getting away if they are “encountered by chance” and it is not possible to arrest them without applying to a judge for a warrant. For hundreds of years in this country we have woken judges and magistrates up in the middle of the night to do precisely that: to carry out a police action, be it a search or an arrest. We do not bypass normal legal protections when a domestic suspect might get away, so why is this necessary in respect of individuals facing extradition? The Home Office’s own impact assessment of these new powers says that, with or without them,

“suspects are highly likely to be before the court in any event when the requesting state confirms that the suspect is at large in the UK.”

So one has to wonder why the provision is needed at all.

The methodology used in the impact assessment supporting the Bill is both opaque and bogus. It is too long to go into here, but I recommend that if Members want a confusing way to go to sleep, they should read it—it is completely useless. Even so, it asserts that the proposed change would result annually in just

“6 individuals entering the CJS more quickly than would otherwise have been the case.”

That is just six individuals a year in the criminal justice system, out of the more than 100,000 criminals we deal with in this country every year, and for that we are giving away a fundamental legal protection for the innocent, as well as for anybody else.

The Bill’s explanatory notes try to justify the legislation on the basis that it is similar to powers introduced by our European neighbours, such as Spain. Let me give the House one example of that in operation. Members will know the name of Bill Browder, who campaigned on behalf of Sergei Magnitsky, the man who died in Russian imprisonment; in effect, he was killed by the Russian state. The Russians put out a red notice through Interpol for Mr Browder, and the Spanish Government executed it. Right enough, a judge subsequently released him, but I ask the House to think how Mr Browder would have felt, sitting in a Spanish prison considering the prospect of being extradited to be imprisoned in Russia and put into the hands of the people who had killed Magnitsky. These things are not without price.

As for other European countries, a number of them have absolute embargoes on extraditing their own citizens to anybody outside the EU, for reasons that I will come to in a second, but which in essence relate to a lack of trust in other countries’ justice systems.

The Bill’s impact assessment states:

“Under the proposed new power, the police could arrest a suspect who was wanted for extradition by a trusted partner country”.

The Bill defines such a country as

“those who respect the international rules based system”—

broadly speaking, although not entirely, the United States does that—

“and whose Red Notices and Criminal Justice Systems the UK trusts”.

We like to think of the US justice system as similar to our own, but recent high-profile cases have highlighted just how wrong that is and how we cannot trust the system with the interests of British citizens.

When the 2003 extradition treaty and the associated Bill were introduced, they were sold to the House on the basis that they would be used principally for paedophiles, murderers and terrorists. I was shadow Home Secretary at the time and I remember it vividly. I remember the leader of the Conservative party at the time accepting it on those terms, because he thought it was in the interests of the country. But the people we are extraditing to the United States are mostly white collar businessmen who pose no danger to United Kingdom citizens, or indeed United States citizens.

[Mr Andrew Mitchell (Sutton Coldfield) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend is making a characteristically sensible and robust speech. Does he agree that at the moment the international rules-based system is under great pressure but matters hugely to all of us? Is the case of the United States not an example of a totally asymmetric approach to extradition and will that asymmetry not be seen by people in Britain as most unfair and as bringing the whole process into disrepute?

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is right on several counts, and I will elaborate on the unfairness in a second, but he is right also to highlight something else, which is that international rules-based systems work only if everyone sees them treating all countries and their citizens identically. If they do not do that, they fall down. An American exceptionalist approach, therefore, destroys the systems we are trying to uphold. So there is an interesting philosophical point in his intervention, as well as the moral one that I will major on.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Mitchell]

It is not just a case of lack of reciprocity. The people in the NatWest case, which my right hon. Friend mentioned, had no case to answer according to the British authorities, yet in spite of that they were extradited. That is an appalling abuse of their human rights.

[Mr Davis]

My right hon. Friend is exactly right. Interestingly, in their case human rights were not used as a defence mechanism, whereas in another case the only thing that stopped Gary McKinnon being extradited was the implementation of the human rights law. My right hon. Friend is right more generally, too; they did not have a case to answer in a normal justice system, but they gave in and confessed to guilt rather than face 30 years in a grim high-security Texan prison, never seeing their families again, which is what this would have amounted to. That illustrates where the disparity lies, and why it is so unfair.

The US Government also have much greater discretion in refusing extradition requests. Under the Extradition Act 2003, the Secretary of State “must”—the word is “must”—issue a certificate for extradition. The equivalent US code states that the Secretary of State “may” order the person to be tried. Of course, there is no stronger demonstration of this than the case of Anne Sacoolas, the person responsible for the tragic death of Harry Dunn. In Ms Sacoolas’s case the US Secretary of State used this discretion—I think in the view of most in this House, wrongly—to prevent her extradition. The Dunn family may now have to settle for a wholly unsatisfactory virtual trial of Anne Sacoolas, because our extradition arrangements have failed to give them proper justice.

That is just the latest example of how the completely lopsided treaty allows US citizens to evade justice while exposing United Kingdom citizens to miscarriages of justice. The Prime Minister himself has recognised this imbalance. At Prime Minister’s questions on 12 February he said:

“I do think that elements of that relationship are unbalanced, and it is certainly worth looking at”.—[Official Report, 12 February 2020; Vol. 671, c. 846.]

Due to the scope of the Bill, my amendments would not rebalance the extradition arrangements with the US, but they would prevent, in a very small way, further facilitation of further miscarriages of justice. It would be a tiny improvement in a system that requires an entirely radical rewrite, so I am only moving them as probing amendments today.

The simple truth is—I make this point very firmly to my right hon. and very old Friend the Minister for Security, who is sitting on the Treasury Bench—[Interruption.] He is older than you think. I say to the Minister that this really needs, in the words of the Prime Minister, a rethink. I do hope that the Government will rethink this treaty and ensure that in future when we extradite British citizens to any other justice system in the world, that justice system will work as it is supposed to, and give them what is in the title: justice.