EU Justice and Home Affairs Measures

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Wednesday 19th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. There will be a seven-minute time limit on Back-Bench speeches in today’s debate. We will start with seven minutes, but it might be necessary to reduce the time.

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[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. Before I call the next speaker, I do not expect to hear you, Mr Carswell, continually shouting across the Chamber at Members who are speaking, as you just did to the previous speaker. Just because you are sitting further away from me than you did in the past does not mean I cannot hear you, and I would be grateful if you listened to the debate.

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[Philip Davies (Shipley) (Con)]

My hon. Friend says that it is very easy for people to get from one country to another and that we need to do something about these crimes. Surely the solution would be to make it much harder to get from one country to another. What we should be doing is stopping this free movement of people which is allowing all these criminals to come through our border controls daily with impunity. Surely that is what we should be dealing with.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. We are very short of time, and I am trying to protect the hon. Lady and the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), who has been waiting patiently to speak. Taking interventions from people, however eminent, who have just entered the Chamber in the past few minutes would not really be fair on the final speakers.

[Jackie Doyle-Price]

Thank you for that, Madam Deputy Speaker. All I would say is that often such people are evading our border controls, so it is a lot more complicated than my hon. Friend says.

I have witnessed at first hand, in the ports in my constituency, just how difficult it is for Border Force and for the police to tackle the activities of serious and well-organised international criminal gangs, and that work relies on international co-operation. Members will recall that only last summer a metal container containing a number of fleeing Afghan Sikhs was intercepted at Tilbury. Anyone who spends an amount of time in a poorly ventilated metal container is dicing with death—they are playing Russian roulette with their life. They have to be desperate to do that and there are people willing to exploit that desperation and make considerable sums out of them. We are not going to be able to tackle that kind of people trafficking without having good, strong international co-operation. In witnessing that incident, it was impressive to see how quickly arrests were made, and that was very much due to the co-operation between law enforcement agencies in the various ports that that container had travelled through. In that event, the perpetrators came from within our own jurisdiction, but that is not always the case. Such people trafficking is happening every day, and we have to get a lot sharper and smarter at dealing with it. These measures will be an important tool in doing so.

I am grateful for the changes the Government have made to the European arrest warrant, which go a long way to tackling many of the concerns that have been expressed in this debate about people’s liberties and the need to make sure that people will not be extradited for offences that would not be offences in this country. I feel strongly that we will be vigilant about that, that we will make sure the process continues to operate in a way that underlines the need for justice, and that we will always be vigilant in protecting the liberties of our own subjects. The reality is that the EAW will be deployed only in dealing with the most serious crime—murder, manslaughter, rape, terrorism, war crimes and people trafficking. Much as I dislike the EU, I am not going to get in the way of justice for victims of such offences, and let perverts and murderers walk free.

There are some outside this House who would rather engage in an ideological war about Europe than do what is necessary to keep our people safe—I am not in that category. If I thought these measures were not necessary, I would not support them. There is a very real debate to be had about our relationship with Europe, and it is one that Conservative Members are determined to have before letting the people decide in a referendum. In the meantime, lets give our law enforcement agencies the tools they need to do the job to keep us safe.

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[Mr Bone]

My hon. Friend is making a most powerful speech; he has persuaded me tonight to vote against this measure. As a good Tory, I always vote against Opposition motions anyway. Will he expand a little more on his point?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman will speak briefly so that we can get to the wind-ups. I am afraid that his hon. Friend has shaved a minute off his time; he has 47 seconds.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Habeas corpus is at risk. We also risk bringing in the European public prosecutor, because if that body is created—and it is under discussion—we will find that it can get the member states that join to issue arrest warrants, circumventing the protection that we have in our own law and the referendum lock. Of absolutely crucial importance is this issue of mutual recognition. Once we start with mutual recognition, we then set similar standards, and our justice will have crept away. The arrest warrant is very dangerous; it is against Tory party policy. The procedure has been dreadful and we should defeat it this evening.