EU Justice and Home Affairs Measures

Graham Stringer Excerpts

Wednesday 19th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton) (Lab)]

I congratulate the shadow Home Secretary on putting before the House a simple and straightforward motion. This difficult and complicated issue involves sovereignty, international crime and the future of the European Union, so it is right that elected Members—even those of us who do not agree with the shadow Home Secretary—can vote on such a straightforward motion.

If the debate was just about the improvements that the Government have made to the European arrest warrant, it might be possible to vote for it, although as my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) pointed out, many of those improvements do not go as far as they should. If this was simply a matter of the speed of getting through the judicial process, it would be easy to vote for it, for the reasons given by the right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green). But it goes much deeper than that. There are justices and injustices involved.

I do not know how to balance the injustices suffered by some people against the undoubted benefits derived from the European arrest warrant. How do we say to Symeou, Dark, Hainsworth, the Kings, Dines and other people who have suffered injustices, “Your injustice under the European arrest warrant is worth going through because it enables us to bring other criminals to court more quickly”? We cannot balance things that way. If we could, I would be interested to know what metric could be used.

The basic issue is not the speed of justice or improvements to the EAW. It is the fact that by entering the European arrest warrant system, we are giving recognition to courts throughout the European Union and passing sovereignty over to the European Court of Justice. To anybody who has read the accession documents just on Croatia—the same comments could be applied to Romania, Bulgaria and a number of other European countries—it is almost beyond dispute that those countries do not have a criminal justice system like ours. Theirs is subject to corruption and political interference, yet we are saying that the European arrest warrant procedure agreed in those countries will be recognised and followed through in this country.

I do not see how we can honour what has been honoured in this country for nearly 800 years—habeas corpus—when we allow British citizens to be taken by foreign courts that are subject to political interference and corruption, and locked up without the evidence being produced.

[Sir Oliver Heald]

It is not as though nothing is being done about that. The group of states against corruption, of which the UK is a very strong member, is doing work on these very issues—on corruption in courts and in Parliaments. It is going through the countries that the hon. Gentleman is talking about, reporting on these issues, highlighting them and pressing the Governments.

[Graham Stringer]

That is a fair point, but anyone who had been locked up in Romania or Croatia would not be pleased to hear that the situation will improve at some time in the future. The debate is among British politicians who are pragmatic; the arguments put forward by the Home Secretary and the shadow Home Secretary were powerful, pragmatic arguments about how there would be immediate benefit, but that is not the argument going on in the rest of the European Union.

Like many of the changes in the European Union, acceptance of the European arrest warrant is seen as a way of furthering integration. We are not entering into arrangements for the European prosecutor’s role, but I can almost guarantee—as much as one can guarantee anything in future—that in four, five, six or seven years’ time we will have adopted the European arrest warrant, this country will be in Eurojust and it will not look right if we are not in the European prosecutor system. We may well get a decision from the European Court of Justice that says, in effect, that we have to be in the European prosecutor system.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman accept that, through the use of the European arrest warrant, British citizens could be extradited to face charges under the European public prosecutor’s office anyway if prosecuted for those charges?

[Graham Stringer]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right, and that might be one of the arguments used to drag us into the process. The European Union is a thin-end-of-the-wedge organisation; once it has started, it will move on to further integration.

The right hon. Member for Ashford made a powerful case, as have many Members, for dealing with international crime and keeping terrorism out of the country, which we all want—there is nobody in the House who does not want to deal with international terrorism—but what we have with the European arrest warrant is Hobson’s choice: we must either take what is put before us or have a poorer system, in pragmatic terms, in the short term. If the Government are serious about renegotiating our position in Europe, they should not be giving up negotiating positions like this. We should be asking for a better position, rather than saying, “Yes, we’ll go along with that because there is nothing else available.”

The right hon. Member for Ashford also made the point that many of our crime-fighting agencies, such as the police and the security services, like the European arrest warrant. They do not always follow the rules themselves, but our security services have for some time preferred to have terrorists in London, rather than elsewhere, so that they can watch them. I think that is a bad policy, but I mention it because I do not think that we should always take at face value what is said by police forces and the security services.

I will finish with a powerful point made by the shadow Home Secretary in the previous debate that I think is worthy of an answer. She said that the fact that there have been miscarriages of justice under the European arrest warrant does not mean that we should get rid of it. We do not remove the police’s power of arrest just because they sometimes abuse it. That is absolutely right, but it does not mean that, when opting into something, we should not look for something better than what we are getting from the European arrest warrant.