EU Police, Justice and Home Affairs

Dominic Raab Excerpts

Wednesday 12th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Gentleman has made an important point. When the European Union Committee in the House of Lords was considering precisely these issues, and discussing cases in which there had been allegations of injustice, it commented:

“these arose from the consequences of extradition, including long periods of pre-trial detention in poor prison conditions, which could occur under any alternative system of extradition. Relying upon alternative extradition arrangements is highly unlikely to address the criticisms directed at the EAW and would inevitably render the extradition process more protracted and cumbersome, potentially undermining public safety.”

[Mr Dominic Raab (Esher and Walton) (Con)]

rose—

[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman, but I must make a bit of progress first.

We have been struggling to find out what the Government are actually doing, and what their position actually is on these important measures. Today’s edition of The Guardian gave us some clues. It states that the Prime Minister is expected to opt into 30 to 40 measures, that a deal is being done by the Chief Secretary to the Treasury and the Minister for Government Policy, the right hon. Member for West Dorset (Mr Letwin), who sits in the Cabinet Office, and that

“the Tories want to opt back in to no more than 29”

so that they can say that they opted out of 100.

“The Lib Dems, who had been pressing for… 70…recently settled on a figure of about 45.

Ministers are planning to split the difference between 45 and 29, meaning the coalition will sign up to about 35 of the measures.”

This, it appears, is a numbers game. It is no way to decide on serious issues that affect the fight against crime and future justice for victims. However, we think it excellent that the Government have handed over negotiations to the right hon. Member for West Dorset. We recall that the last time the Prime Minister tried that, in relation to Leveson, the Cabinet Office Minister came over to our place and allowed us to draft the policy. We are quite happy to do that again if the Government cannot sort it out.

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[Yvette Cooper]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Some aspects of the warrant should be improved and reformed and there are other areas of European co-operation that we should seek to improve. For example, we should ensure that the European arrest warrant is not used for too many minor crimes. We should also work with other European countries to ensure that when people become victims or suspects of crime abroad, they can be assured of proper legal support and justice. But it is still better to stay in and argue for reform than to pull out of the European arrest warrant when it is so important to our police and to victims.

The Prime Minister has said in the past that the European arrest warrant is highly objectionable, yet the Association of Chief Police Officers has said that opting out of it means

“higher costs, more offenders evading justice and increased risk to public safety.”

What is the Home Secretary’s view? Are we in or out of the arrest warrant? In or out? In the last year alone, Britain sent 900 people back to other countries under an arrest warrant, 95% of whom were foreign nationals. The Home Secretary makes great play of complaining that she cannot send back enough foreign criminals, but now she wants to make it harder to send back people suspected of serious crimes abroad—why?

The European arrest warrant—in or out? The prisoner transfer framework—in or out? That is the one that means we can transfer prisoners back to their home country without their consent. What about the Home Secretary’s position on joint investigation teams, which have helped to stop a human trafficking ring bringing young Czech women into Britain for prostitution and rape. Thirty-three victims were found and nine people were convicted as a result of a joint investigation team. A similar operation undertaken with the Romanian police stopped a gang trafficking children into the UK and meant that victims were protected. So joint investigation teams—in or out? What about sharing criminal records? The UK has received more than 500 notifications of British citizens convicted in other EU member states who need to go on the sex offenders register here at home. I am happy to give way to the Home Secretary if she will stand up and tell us whether she supports the sharing of information about sexual offences so that people can be put on the sex offenders register here. Yes or no? In or out? [Interruption.] Again we have silence from the Home Secretary, who cannot tell us, whether it be on sharing criminal records or on the European arrest warrant, what the Government’s position is on these vital measures.

[Mr Raab]

The Opposition motion refers to eight specific measures out of the 135 or so, so I just want to clarify the Labour party’s position: is it advocating the exercise of the block opt-out and then selectively opting back in, or is it saying that there should be no exercise of the block opt-out at all?

[Yvette Cooper]

The Home Secretary has not yet told us whether she actually has a workable way to do that, and we wait to see whether she has a workable way to deliver that at all. She has said that she wants a blanket opt-out, but most of her Back Benchers want to opt out of the lot and not opt back into anything. Our clear view is that we should not have a blanket opt-out that puts at risk the European arrest warrant and the crucial things needed for the fight against crime.

On criminal records, is the Home Secretary in or out? Again we have no answer from her. Sharing alerts on suspected criminals, or trafficking or kidnapping victims, crossing borders—in or out? Minimum standards for tackling online child exploitation—in or out? Information sharing on football hooligans—in or out? Co-operating on seizing criminals’ assets—in or out? Taking account of foreign convictions in court cases—in or out? Working with other countries on dealing with international genocide and war crimes—in or out?

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[Mrs May]

ACPO, as it has made clear to Committees of this House, has set out those measures that it feels will be useful in a policing sense. There is absolutely no secret about what ACPO has made clear.

[Mr Raab]

It may help the Home Secretary to know that in its submission to the House of Lords European Union Committee, ACPO reckoned that only 13 of the 135 measures were vital for law enforcement. Is she aware of that and does it not cast a shadow on the spurious law enforcement claims of the Opposition?

[Mrs May]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend. Indeed, I believe that ACPO went on to say that 55 of the measures had no practical effect whatsoever.

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[Mr Dominic Raab (Esher and Walton) (Con)]

I welcome the Home Secretary’s speech and the broad strategic approach that she outlined. For my part, I want Britain to be a strong operational partner in Europe, but I do not believe that we need to give up democratic control over such a vital policy area to achieve that. We should consider all measures against the criteria of the UK’s national interest.

Few would object to European-wide criminal record checks to protect the public, but signing up for pan-European data sharing on every ordinary citizen is Orwellian and dangerous. As the UK’s surveillance of its people has expanded, data sharing with EU Governments has exposed the innocent to far greater risk. The classic case is that of Peter Hamkin, a Liverpool bartender wrongly arrested in 2003 for murdering an Italian woman because of a botched DNA match. He never set foot in Italy. New EU regulations risk a flood of such cases. Brussels wants foreign police to have access to the details of 38 million motorists on the UK Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency database, as well as DNA and fingerprint records. Even the Commission concedes in its impact assessment that systemic flaws could lead to false matches sucking the innocent into foreign investigations. Everyone has been so sensitive about this, but the raw truth is that I do not trust the criminal justice systems or safeguards in many EU countries; I am thinking particularly of some of those on the periphery of the EU, but also some of the long-standing members.

According to the Association of Chief Police Officers, only 29 of the 135 EU measures that are subject to the block opt-out benefit UK law enforcement at all, and of those only 13 are vital. Far from enhancing law enforcement, the vast majority of measures that the previous Government signed Britain up to were utterly pointless. That is what ACPO’s evidence means. [Interruption.] It clearly does, but I will not take an intervention because of the time. We do not need to be part of efforts to harmonise national law in areas such as drugs or corruption, and certainly not in areas that cover free speech.

The EU spews out legislation, but where is the evidence that it delivers? The previous Government never had proper impact assessments or evaluations of it. Let us take one example—the six laws on corruption under the EU. Transparency International says that EU standards have barely budged over a decade. In fact, corruption got worse in 10 countries. Then there was the push on criminal justice standards, whereas Fair Trials International found that violations of pre-trial rights trebled across the EU in the past four years and unfair trials doubled. Hyperactive supranational legislation has proved a fig leaf for the lack of national institutional capacity building that really raises standards of justice for all Europe’s citizens.

I spent three years in the Foreign Office in The Hague monitoring Europol and Eurojust. I have no problem at all with a college of prosecutors or police officers engaging in practical authority-to-authority co-operation, but that is a snapshot of the present, and the question is where all this is leading. There is already a new EU regulation on Europol and one is expected on Eurojust. They are clearly envisaged by the Commission—I have the draft policy papers here—as stepping stones towards a pan-European criminal code enforced by Europol and Eurojust, backed up and interpreted by the European Court of Justice. We need to look not just at the current state of co-operation, but where this is headed.

The most controversial measure is, of course, the European arrest warrant. I understand entirely that police rely on it and I understand that it has expedited process, but Commander Gibson of the Metropolitan police has highlighted the fact that

“resources are stretched dealing with the amount of EAWs we receive”,

because the regime is utterly lopsided. The number of hon. Members who complain about the lopsided nature of US extradition, yet turn a blind eye, because of their Europhilia, to the EAW is quite remarkable, so let me give them the facts. For every EAW that Britain issued in 2011, we got 33 back. We receive a third of all European arrest warrants.

I know from many cases—that of Andrew Symeou and in my own constituency the case of Colin Dines—the extremely rough justice that perfectly innocent people have been through. Why? Because we cannot trust the justice systems in many countries. It is not just the new members. Italy and Greece have incompetent justice systems and appalling prison conditions, and we are and have been hanging our citizens out to dry for far too long. We need reform and the strongest way to press for reform is to opt out and, as a condition of opting back in, to insist on a number of basic safeguards. The proportionality test has been mentioned, and there are other safeguards.

The EAW is supposed to allow hit-and-hope warrants that involve extradition for the purposes of investigation, rather than prosecution. That happens all the time. I have proposed amendments, which Members in all parts of the House thought would be a good idea, to enact in UK law a basic safeguard to make sure that extradition under the EAW can take place only in a case that is trial-ready, for prosecution and not for investigation, yet we have never achieved that. If we want to exercise some leverage over our European partners, who get much more out of the system reciprocally than we do—I accept that there is a strong law enforcement advantage to the UK—we should use our leverage from the block opt-out to press for those reforms.

We should not take into account only what the police say. We do not live in a police state. Their view is very important, but we should also take into account the views of the most senior extradition judge in this country, Lord Justice Thomas, who told the Baker review that the EAW system has become “unworkable”, that unfairness is a “huge problem” and that there is widespread consensus among the judges in northern Europe that this is a problem, but there is obviously great sensitivity, and sensibilities, among some of the Mediterranean countries.

Beyond the individual cost-benefit analysis of these measures, we need to grasp the big picture and the long term. EU Commission President José Manuel Barroso has made it clear that he wants a pan-European criminal code, enforced by the Commission and the European Court, and an EU public prosecutor. If we want to preserve our common law system and democratic oversight in this vitally sensitive area, is now the right time to seek broader and more flexible arrangements for co-operation?

That is why this specific opt-out decision should not be divorced from the need to renegotiate Britain’s wider justice and home affairs relationship. There are plenty of precedents. We are not a full-blown member of Frontex, but its executive director has said

“we do not see any difference between our UK colleagues and the others”.

That is a good example of where we co-operate operationally but do not need to be signed up, lock, stock and barrel, with the cessation of democratic prerogatives that that involves.

The way this has been presented as some kind of life-threatening problem for UK law enforcement is incredible, when one thinks of our relationship with authorities outside Europe. The strategic alliance group, which includes Britain, the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, collaborates on cybercrime and intelligence under a non-binding framework. Frankly, Brussels is the odd one out in insisting on a Faustian bargain that requires us to sacrifice democratic control as the price of co-operation.

The ideologues in this debate are not those calling for a renegotiation in justice and home affairs, based on operational co-operation rather than supranational control, but the dogmatic Europhiles who would blindly sacrifice British standards of justice and democratic accountability when the law enforcement case is so utterly weak.

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

This has been an interesting debate, although we are absolutely none the wiser about the Government’s policy. I am delighted that the Home Secretary has come back into the Chamber; perhaps she will be able to provide us with some answers later.

Last year the Prime Minister said that he would be exercising the opt-out, then the Deputy Prime Minister disagreed, and then the Home Secretary said that the Government’s current thinking was to opt out. We have therefore tabled an Opposition motion to try to tease out the Government’s position and precisely what they intend to do, because we know that this is a matter of national security. The Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), was absolutely right when he said not long ago that we should not be naive about the process of renegotiation if we want to opt out and then opt back in. As he said, the Commission would attach conditions—for instance, it might allow us to join groups of related measures, some of which we like while others we might not.

Our view is that thus far this has been a pretty shabby process. When we tried to enable the House to debate the European arrest warrant during the progress of the Crime and Courts Bill, Government Ministers and Back Benchers talked out the debate so that we never managed to discuss the matter at all. All the relevant Committees in this House and in the House of Lords have complained that they have been given negligible information by the Government. We have been given no clarity of any kind as to what measures they might be considering opting into—not even a clear idea on their final resolution of whether they intend to opt out in general—and we had no clarity today.

We still have no clarity about what kind of votes we are going to have. The Home Secretary trumpeted the fact that last year the Europe Minister, who is in his place, charming chap that he is, said that we would have a vote in both Houses. However, he did not say whether they would be binding votes—just that they would be votes before the Government made their final decision. He did not say whether the votes would be on a list of what we are to opt into and opt out of. He did not say whether they would be on amendable motions. He did not say what would happen if one House voted one way and the other House voted the other.

The truth is that a double tug of war is going on, as we know from The Guardian today. The first is between the two sides of the Government—the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives. It is great that the man who actually boasts of having invented the poll tax when he worked at No. 10 under Mrs Thatcher is now in charge of these negotiations as the Minister for Government Policy. The other tug of war is between Conservative Members, some of them on the ultra-right and some on the moderate right. Some might be referred to historically as the H-block—the Heaton-Harris and Hannan end of the Conservative party. It reminds me of the Old Testament—two women claim that a baby is theirs and it is only when Solomon says that the baby should be cut in half that one of them owns up. I am worried that the Government’s policy-making process means that they are simply playing a numbers game in which they spin different things to different parts of the media and the end result will be that British security will lose out.

It is all pretty sad, really, because historically the United Kingdom has led and campaigned for greater co-operation on many of these issues in the European Union. It is a simple matter of fact that ease of travel, faster telecommunications and the ability to send money from one country to another much faster mean that no country is hermetically sealed any more. Indeed, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) has said, criminality does not stop at the channel. When I first typed out that sentence, it said, “does not stop at the Chanel”, which is rather different.

On joint investigation teams, our advances in recent years and the increased number of such teams mean that we are able to tackle forms of criminality that we were never able to deal with before.

The Association of Chief Police Officers has been mentioned many times. I accept the point made by the hon. Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) that, just because a police officer says something, that does not necessarily mean that we need to put it into law. However, ACPO has pointed out:

“The presence of fugitives from justice fleeing to the UK is a significant public safety issue.”

It stands to reason that if we make it more difficult for people to be extradited from this country by resiling from the European arrest warrant, we will, in effect, open ourselves up to the danger of being a haven for them.

[Mr Raab]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

I will not give way, because we have very little time left and the hon. Gentleman took up quite a large amount of time himself.

I believe that the European arrest warrant is invaluable. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) has said, it is invaluable for victims apart from anything else. Without it, ACPO says that

“It is not just foreign criminals who would sit for years in UK jails. UK court cases would stall for many years as we waited to get our fugitives back, robbing their victims of the chance for justice to be served.”

Similarly, the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) referred to the case of Hussain Osman, who planted a bomb on 21 July 2005 which, thank God, did not go off. Within eight days he had been arrested, having gone through Paris to Rome, and by September he was back in this country, thanks to the European arrest warrant. Without it, such a process might take up to 10 years in future. That is precisely the kind of thing that we want to avoid.

We have only to look at the statistics for 2011-12. Sometimes the hon. Member for Esher and Walton—whom I respect enormously in many regards, but not in what he says about this—often suggests that this is all about British citizens being extradited, but the vast majority of people surrendered from and to the UK under the European arrest warrant are not British. In 2011-12, Government statistics show that 922 people were extradited from the UK, just 32 of whom were British nationals. They were not extradited to the kinds of countries referred to by the hon. Gentleman: eight went to Ireland, six to the Netherlands and five each to Spain and France. The flow in the other direction was similar: 17 from Ireland and the Netherlands, and 14 from Spain. Of the extraditions, 50 were for homicide, 20 for rape and 90 for robbery. The thought that we might surrender the European arrest warrant and have no sure knowledge of what would stand in its place must be of serious concern to everybody in the country.

The hon. Member for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris), charming though he is, was quite casual about whether there would be an alternative to the European arrest warrant, but all the work of the Lords Committee, the Bar Council and others suggests that we might have to rely on the 1957 convention, which would not solve any single one of the problems with the European arrest warrant that the hon. Member for Esher and Walton referred to. In fact, it would make many of them considerably worse, because it would lead to a longer process and people like Andrew Symeou might end up being imprisoned. Bilateral agreements, for which the hon. Member for South Northamptonshire (Andrea Leadsom) has argued—she is not present, but she leads the charge for many of the more ardent Eurosceptics—would not help either. As my hon. Friend the Member for Hyndburn (Graham Jones) said, there is a danger that we will create a new version of the costa del crime in this country.

There are measures other than the European arrest warrant that we think are vital to our national security. The Schengen information system, the second incarnation of which is not yet fully in place, will mean that every country in the EU will be able to access real-time information on anybody who is of interest to the criminal justice system of any other country at their border and elsewhere. That is an important system and it covers 23 of the measures that we are discussing.

David Anderson QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said that SO15 considers many of the measures that we are talking about to be essential in tackling terrorism. The hon. Member for Esher and Walton mentioned one person who made his concerns about the European arrest warrant known to the Baker review. However, I point out to hon. Members who are deeply troubled by the European arrest warrant that the Baker review said clearly:

“we believe that the European arrest warrant scheme has worked reasonably well.”

[Mr Raab]

rose—

[Chris Bryant]

I will still not give way to the hon. Gentleman because hon. Members wish to hear from the Minister.

I will end by making one further point. I know that there are many pragmatic, sensible pro-Europeans on the Government Benches. Sometimes they remind me of Nicodemus in the New Testament, who was only able to visit Jesus at night because he did not want to own up to his Jewish colleagues on the Sanhedrin about his real views. I can see some of those sensible pro-Europeans now and I am tempted to name them—to out them. Of course, there are plenty of Liberal Members who are sometimes sensible. There are also plenty of Conservatives. It is just a shame that they dare not own up to their true views.

I hope that what comes out of this process is a proper consultation with all the Select Committees and a proper list that does not come out only on the day after the end of May 2014—we know that the Home Secretary is not very good at getting her dates right. I hope that we have a proper process whereby everybody in the House can declare their commitment to the systems that work well in the national interest, and that there is an amendable motion for which all Members can vote.