Leaving the EU: Security, Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice

Debate between David T C Davies and William Cash

Wednesday 18th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[David T. C. Davies (Monmouth) (Con)]

I think that, in the aftermath of the 11 September attacks, it was recognised that something had to be done to speed up extradition processes and reduce the amount of bureaucracy involved. That, in addition to the fact that some career criminals seemed to be using countries such as Spain—the so-called Costa del Crime—as a permanent home, meant that I was happy to give the then Government the benefit of the doubt. I have always supported the principle of a European arrest warrant, and we have heard many important speeches in support of it today. However, although I do not disagree with the principle of what has been said, it cannot be denied that there are cases that have given rise to concern.

The European extradition warrant makes the assumption that standards of justice are the same in all EU countries, that standards in prisons are the same, and that bail conditions will be the same as well. In short, it assumes that human rights are respected in exactly the same way throughout the European Union. My hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill), the Chairman of the Justice Committee, said that he had no doubt that standards of justice in Germany and France were exactly the same as they are in the UK, and I do not really have any doubt about that either, but I do have concerns about the overall standards of justice in other parts of the European Union.

Some of the cases that concern me have already been mentioned briefly. There was the case of Andrew Symeou, who spent nearly a year in prison, having been denied bail, because he was not a Greek resident. In other words, he was extradited because he was a European, but was unable to get bail because he was not actually Greek. He served time in some pretty awful places. Both my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst and I are members of the Council of Europe. I do not know what visits my hon. Friend has made, but I have certainly seen a Greek detention centre, and, having served as a special constable, I would say that the conditions were illegal under any European rules and regulations.

We were shown a room that was probably not much more than a quarter of the size of the Chamber. It contained 30 or 40 people who were being held in those conditions for up to a year for various immigration infractions, and who, as far as I could tell, were given very little time out. That was totally unacceptable. It would have been unacceptable to hold anyone in conditions like that for 48 hours in a UK police station. It comes to something when people are actually begging to be sent to a Greek prison because their existing conditions are so bad.

There was the case of Gary Mann, who was tried for and convicted of an affray-type offence within 48 hours of being arrested. He had not, in fact, been involved. He was released, but there was subsequently a demand for him to return to Portugal to serve a two-year sentence. He was not given access to facilities that we take for granted, such as translation facilities, which are extremely important.

There have been other such cases. There was, for instance, the case of Edmond Arapi, about which I read on the Fair Trials International website and of which I had not been aware before. Apparently he was convicted of murder in his absence, despite the fact that at the time the murder in question took place he was working, or studying, in the United Kingdom. There were numerous witnesses to say that he had been in the UK on the day and nowhere near the country in which the murder was supposed to have taken place, yet he went through years of hell because of the strong possibility that he would be extradited to Italy to serve, I think, a 19-year sentence.

It could at least be said that, in those instances, the motivation was to reduce crime and to deal with straightforward criminality, even if we think that the standards applied were simply not good enough. Other cases are now beginning to emerge that have a more worrying motivation, and I want to pay particular attention to what the Romanian Government are doing at the moment. They have indicated that they may serve an arrest warrant against an award-winning Sky journalist, Stuart Ramsay, and his team, who put together a documentary about gun-running in Romania which the Romanian Government did not like. I do not know whether the claims made were accurate, but he is an award-winning Sky journalist and I have no reason to doubt them. If Governments do not like journalists’ stories about them, they have the right to rebut them, but it is simply unacceptable for Governments to start issuing arrest and judicial proceedings against journalists who have upset them. That would never be acceptable in this country.

There is another ongoing case that I find particularly worrying: the extradition warrant served against Alexander Adamescu, also by the Romanian Government. He is becoming a bit of a cause célèbre at present. His father runs a newspaper in Romania which has been highly critical of the Romanian Government. The Romanian Prime Minister at the time said he was corrupt and had him arrested, and he was found guilty in a short space of time. There are all sorts of reasons why one might question the court case but it is not really for me to do so here. The point is that when his son, who is a UK resident and an aspiring playwright, filed charges against the Romanian Government, he was served with an EAW and was arrested on the streets of London on his way to speak to the Frontline Club about the importance of journalistic freedoms. There was also an attempt to kidnap his wife by masked men, which still has not properly been dealt with, and nobody has been found.

These are very worrying cases as they give rise to the concern that, rather than trying to have people arrested to resolve criminality, some Governments—on the basis of those two cases the Romanian Government are one that worries me—seem to be using the EAW to send out a message that anyone who questions them or tries to hold them to account will run the risk of being taken off the streets of the country in which they are resident, arrested and sent back to Romania or elsewhere for trial.

[Sir William Cash]

There is another problem that the European Scrutiny Committee has looked at in the past, when we had the Fair Trials team in to give us evidence: some of the judges are politically appointed.

[David T. C. Davies]

My hon. Friend makes an important point.

I have listened with great interest to what has been said in this debate. I was of course a supporter of Brexit, but that in no way means I oppose the EAW or the principles behind it.