Brexit: European Arrest Warrant (European Union Committee)

Earl of Kinnoull Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Kinnoull (CB)]

My Lords, I apologise that I was not able to put my name down for the debate and am speaking in the gap; I was due to be an expert witness in a case today which has now been delayed at short notice. I declare my interests as a member of both the European Union Select Committee and of the EU Justice Sub-Committee, which is so ably chaired by the noble Baroness who spoke earlier.

I will make just a very few points. First, this is an excellent report. It is jolly hard to write a short essay; it is only 22 pages and it frames everything very well. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Jay, and his committee on that. Secondly, I was also on the four-day EU Select Committee trip to Ireland last week, and I sat through the eye-opening session with representatives of the Police Service of Northern Ireland. They made it very clear how important to the overall setup the European arrest warrant is. The key quote was:

“It is a critical part of our toolbox”.


I wrote that down on my papers, and it underlines the importance of achieving a solution here. It is also worth saying that, apart from that, we heard the same point made by politicians and by academics—it was not just a dry comment made by policemen.

My final point is about a comment made to me by an Austrian lawyer in January. He said, knowing what I do on the Select Committee, “I do hope something will be done about the European Union arrest warrant”. I replied, “I’m very surprised that that is the first thing you’ve had to say about Brexit”. I should say that I know this person very well. He said, “It is, because it is something which Austria uses a lot, and it’s a very important feature”. Being me, I started looking up the statistics. I have here the at-a-glance infographic issued by the European Parliament about the arrest warrant. It is very interesting: Austria was in fact the sixth-biggest issuer of arrest warrants in the period covered by the statistics, which was 2005 to 2013. But more interesting is the data on incoming receipts. The country with the largest number was Germany, and the country with the second-largest number was Britain: in that period we received 32,100 arrest warrants. Germany received more than that. The country receiving the next-highest number of incoming arrest warrants—requests to perform an arrest in your country—was France, with only 6,420.

Those statistics show how important it is for European Union countries for their own justice purposes to continue to be able to exercise things for us, just as it is vital for us to be able to do it as well. For that reason, I feel very much that we are pushing at an open door. I always love listening to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood, who laid out a very sensible way of trying to handle this issue, which I look forward to reading again. That seems to be where a solution could be found. I hope that the Minister will be able to give us some comfort that we are pushing at the open door.