The UK’s Justice and Home Affairs Opt-outs

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Thursday 10th July 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mrs May]

There are two issues in relation to that. First, people often say, “That’s what Denmark has; it is able to negotiate directly because it has a complete opt-out on these matters.” However, Denmark does not have any other legal avenue for opting in to those measures. As the Commission has made clear, given that there is another legal avenue for the United Kingdom—as negotiated by the previous Government—that is what should be pursued, rather than a separate extradition treaty with the EU. Secondly, I say to right hon. and hon. Members who think that some form of bilateral treaty would be a way of getting around the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice, that Denmark has been required to submit to the jurisdiction of the ECJ as part of the conditions of agreeing a treaty with the European Union.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

The Home Secretary is right that the European arrest warrant is needed and right in principle, but the Home Affairs Committee was concerned about the way it has operated. I know she has worked hard to put forward changes, with forum bars and other such issues, but at the end of the day she does not have control over the judiciary in a country such as Poland. Some of those countries are issuing warrants that are executed in our country, and it is extremely difficult to control that.

[Mrs May]

That is one of the issues we are addressing. One problem that has been raised—particularly in relation to the country that the right hon. Gentleman mentioned—is the number of arrest warrants being issued for offences at the lower end of the scale that would perhaps not be treated in the same way in the United Kingdom. That is why we have considered the issue of proportionality, and introduced the requirement that a British judge will consider whether the alleged offence and likely sentence is sufficient to make someone’s extradition proportionate. We have written the need to address that issue of potential disproportionality into our legislation, and it will come into effect soon.

[Keith Vaz]

I am grateful for that information. Further to what the hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh) said, the Committee also decided, because of the concerns of so many Members, that there should be a separate vote specifically on the European arrest warrant when this package comes before the House. Will the Home Secretary agree to give the House a separate vote on that?

[Mrs May]

I am well aware of the views that the Committee put forward in its report, and as I indicated in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh), we have not yet agreed absolutely the final package with other European member states and the European Commission, and some technical reservations have been made. We are working on that and expect to be able to remove those reservations, and the House will have an opportunity to vote in due course.

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[Mrs May]

Our police forces of course co-operate with other police forces throughout the world in bringing criminals and perpetrators to justice. The European arrest warrant—I will repeat myself—is an extradition arrangement that improves on the extradition arrangements that we had previously. I recognise that there have been concerns about it, but we have legislated on those concerns here in this Parliament.

I was describing the Prüm system, which is about the easy, efficient and effective comparison of data when appropriate. We have been clear that we cannot rejoin that on 1 December and would not seek to do so. However, in order for the House to consider the matter carefully, the Government will produce a business and implementation case and run a small-scale pilot with all the necessary safeguards in place. We will publish that by way of a Command Paper and bring the issue back to Parliament so that it can be debated in an informed way. We are working towards doing so by the end of next year. However, the decision on whether to rejoin Prüm would be one for Parliament. Unlike the Labour Government, who signed us up to that measure in the first place without any idea how much it would cost or how it would be implemented, the Government will ensure that Parliament has the full facts to inform its decision.

On another subject, I know that my right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary will want to address the probation situation in his closing remarks—that is another measure we have successfully resisted rejoining.

The Government propose to rejoin other measures in the national interest. We wish to rejoin the European supervision order, which allows British subjects to be bailed back to the UK rather than spending months abroad awaiting trial. That will stand alongside the reforms we have made to the European arrest warrant, and make it easier for people such as Mr Symeou to be bailed back to the UK and prevent such injustices from occurring in future.

We are also seeking to rejoin the prisoner transfer framework decision, a measure that my right hon. Friend the Justice Secretary considers important. The framework helps us to remove foreign criminals from British jails—prisoners such as Ainars Zvirgzds, a Latvian national convicted of controlling prostitution, assault, and firearms and drug offences. In April 2012, he was sentenced to 13 and a half years imprisonment in the UK. Last month, he was transferred out of this country to a prison in Latvia, where he will serve the remainder of his sentence. Had it not been for the prison transfer measure, he would have remained in a British prison, at a cost to the British taxpayer of more than £100,000.

We wish to rejoin the measure providing for joint investigation teams, so that we can continue to participate in cross-border operations such as Operation Birkhill. That collaboration with Hungary, funded by Eurojust and assisted by Europol, led to five criminals being sentenced at Croydon Crown court last month to a total of 36 years’ imprisonment for their involvement in trafficking more than 120 women into the United Kingdom from Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. One of those convicted, Vishal Chaudhary, lived in a luxury Canary Wharf penthouse and drove a flashy sports car bought from the money he made selling those women for sex. Chaudhary and his gang managed their operation from a semi-detached house on a suburban street in Hendon, and operated more than 40 brothels across London, including in Enfield and Brent. Their victims were threatened with abuse if they tried to contact their families. Some were forced to have sex with up to 20 clients a day. These are the victims of crime that the measures we are debating today help. Joint investigation teams are a vital tool in the fight against modern slavery, a crime this House so passionately demonstrated earlier this week it wants to see tackled. I hope the House will support rejoining the measures that will help us to do that.

[Keith Vaz]

I support everything the Home Secretary has said in respect of these policing issues. However, why have we not rejoined the European criminal information system, which would have provided us with information on those who come into this country and already have criminal convictions?

[Mrs May]

We discussed the measure the right hon. Gentleman refers to in front of his Committee and other Committees. There are a number ways in which we deal with these matters in terms of exchanging information. I want to be sure that I am looking at the measures to which he is referring and I think that they are Council framework decisions 2009/315/JHA and 2009/316/JHA. They require member states to inform each other about convictions of EU nationals and are an important tool for sharing data. The reason I am hesitating here is that we were certainly discussing the possibility of rejoining this particular measure. [Interruption.] It is in the 35. Yes, that is why I was hesitating. The right hon. Gentleman said we were not in it and I thought it was in the 35 measures we are rejoining, precisely because it gives us the opportunity to share this information.

We also wish to rejoin the Naples II convention, the principal tool for customs co-operation. Operation Stoplamp, which used this measure to exchange vital information with our partners, resulted in the seizure of 1.2 tonnes of cocaine with a street value of about £300 million—again, an outcome I am sure everyone in this House will welcome. We are also seeking to rejoin Europol, which played a key role in helping our law enforcement agencies to fight those criminals who tried to exploit British customers by adulterating our food with horsemeat. It is doing excellent work under the leadership of its British director, Rob Wainwright.

Those are just a handful of examples that illustrate why our participation in these measures is in our national interest. Today’s debate is not about the flawed treaty to which the previous Labour Government signed us up; it is about the decisions we must take now to protect the public and keep the British people safe. The Government’s policy is clear: we have exercised the opt-out and negotiated a deal to rejoin a limited number of measures that we believe it is in the national interest for us to remain part of.

I look forward with interest to the speech from the right hon. Member for Delyn (Mr Hanson), as it would be helpful to know the Opposition’s position on these various measures. Every time we debate them, we see a slightly different position coming forward. I am sorry that the shadow Home Secretary is not here to tell us herself, but perhaps the right hon. Gentleman will be able to tell us whether they would have exercised the opt-out that they negotiated. Would they have remained bound by all 130-plus measures, rather than negotiating a limited number in the national interest? Would they have changed the law to protect British citizens, as we have done in relation to the European arrest warrant? Would they have risked infraction proceedings by rejoining Prüm without fully considering the facts?

The evidence suggests that the Opposition do not share the determination of this party and this Government to reduce the control Brussels has on our criminal justice system. Their position has always been to say one thing and do another. There was a manifesto promise for a vote on the Lisbon treaty, but they refused to hold a referendum. They said they would protect British red lines, but they gave up our veto in policing and criminal justice matters. They negotiated an opt-out and then voted against using it. That contrasts with the position taken by this Government. We support, and have exercised, the United Kingdom’s opt-out. We support the return of powers from Brussels to the UK. We support acting in the national interest by rejoining a limited number of measures to protect British citizens and the victims of crime. This is consistent with our approach to the Europe Union as a whole.

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[Keith Vaz]

Will my Opposition Front Bench colleagues support a separate vote on the European arrest warrant? It caused the Home Affairs Committee a great deal of concern.

[Mr Hanson]

I am relaxed on that, but I do want the European arrest warrant put in place. We have had some safeguards, but I will outline in due course why I want to see it put in place. It would be helpful to have clarity on when the discussions will be concluded and can be voted on. I appreciate that the Home Secretary has some difficulties, but it would be helpful to the House, for the reasons set out by my right hon. Friend, to have an indication on when we can expect to have a complete package to vote on.

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[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the Chairman of the European Scrutiny Committee, the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), and as I have not done so previously, may I congratulate him on the knighthood that has been bestowed on him, which was very well deserved, and may I also say how pleased I am to see the right hon. Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry) here today, because I understand it is his birthday? What a glorious way to celebrate a birthday, talking about the European arrest warrant and the prisoner transfer agreements!

I welcome this debate. As the House has heard from the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash), the Chairs of the three Select Committees wrote to the Justice Secretary and the Home Secretary asking for an early opportunity to debate these issues, and our letter was received very courteously and we now have a debate as a result of our representations. In the view of the Home Affairs Committee it would have been much better if this debate had taken place before the negotiations began. That was one of the recommendations we made after we took evidence from the Home Secretary and others about these important measures, because we felt strongly that if Parliament had made its views clear before the Home Secretary and Justice Secretary started their negotiations, that mandate would have bolstered them in their negotiations with their European partners. Unfortunately, such a debate did not take place before the negotiations began.

I agree with the Chairman of the ESC that there ought to be a vote on this issue. I am glad the Government have said they will have a vote. I would be surprised if there was not a debate before the vote. Even though we are probably only going to have the usual suspects here, I think it should be a long debate, rather than an hour-and-a-half debate, because these are very important measures. What we have asked for—I will come on to this later when we look at the European arrest warrant—is a separate vote specifically on the European arrest warrant. The Committee produced a unanimous report, and those who serve on the Home Affairs Committee have different views on the European Union, so getting a unanimous decision on something of this kind is quite difficult. The Committee unanimously decided, however, that we should be asking for this because of the representations we had received from so many people, including hon. and right hon. Members, about the way in which the European arrest warrant operated.

We have heard what the Home Secretary has done, and I welcome all the steps she has taken, and also the views of the Opposition Front Bench in Committee when it looked at the way in which the arrest warrant was operating. We heard specific evidence in the Committee from, among others, the hon. Members for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) and for South Dorset (Richard Drax) about individual constituency cases where the European arrest warrant had gone wrong. I and the Committee accept the principle of the European arrest warrant. We believe this was an important measure to enable countries that are members of the European Union—and, indeed, beyond, through bilateral agreements —to bring back into the country and offer up those who are wanted in respect of criminal matters. So the principle is fine. However, our concern was the practice, and the examples we received caused us enormous concern.

There was the Andrew Symeou case, which was told to us by the hon. Member for Enfield North, and the case of Michael Turner—a gentleman who was extradited to Hungary and incarcerated there and who never faced any charges and who is a constituent of South Dorset—and other examples that caused Members to say that the European arrest warrant was good in principle but not necessarily good in practice and had caused their constituents a great deal of concern.

As we have heard, the number of requests to our country far exceeds the number of requests that we make. The total cost of executing an incoming European arrest warrant in the United Kingdom is approximately £20,000. The 999 received by the United Kingdom in 2011 are estimated to have cost around £20 million. So this is not justice on the cheap. It costs a great deal of money to execute these warrants.

Our concern was the way in which they were being requested by certain European countries, and I have mentioned Poland but there were other examples. Indeed, if we look at the requests made of Germany and other countries where people are wanted, we see the figures are just as high. The Home Secretary has great negotiating skills, charm and powers of persuasion, which I saw for myself at the Police Federation conference earlier this year, so she is no pushover, and I am sure she went in there and negotiated strongly on behalf of our country, as Ministers have to do, especially knowing the views of Parliament. The fact is, however, she does not have control, and neither does the Justice Secretary with all his great skills and ability, of the Polish judiciary. They do not have control of the Latvian system of justice. They do not have control of the way in which these warrants are issued in the first place. They do have control over the execution, but not over the issuing.

[Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry) (Con)]

There are some other issues around the European arrest warrant and trying to reform it. While we might want to have reforms that make it function better, is it not the case that the European Commission, in co-decision with the European Parliament, has to have the final say on these matters? So we might want to have this reform, but it might never come forward, and that is a fundamental problem about the opt-in, because we give these powers away completely once and for all.

[Keith Vaz]

I defer to the knowledge of the hon. Gentleman with all his vast experience of European affairs. Having served as an MEP for so long in the east midlands, he sought asylum here in the House of Commons and he has rightly raised one of the big issues. We can negotiate, but at the end of the day it is an issue that we need to confront. How are we going to persuade the European Commission on these very important matters?

We have heard about the wheelbarrow case—the man accused of stealing a wheelbarrow who was the subject of a European arrest warrant—and those absconding from prisons on day release or those accused of minor drugs offences. There was a man who gave false details on a £200 bank loan that had already been paid off. A warrant was issued, it had to be executed and that cost £20,000. So the Home Secretary is right to give us the headline examples—as the shadow Immigration Minister also did—of people who commit terrible crimes in other parts of Europe and whom we feel obliged to give back as quickly as possible, but many, many examples go the other way and that shows there are still problems with the warrant. The Home Secretary has made big efforts to make these matters more effective by introducing the forum bar and giving more powers to the judges to look at such cases, but that is not enough when European partners are not prepared to reform their judicial systems, where so many warrants are being issued.

The Home Secretary is often reluctant to tell me about her travel plans after she has been to some of these countries but I am sure that, like me, she has been to Poland. I went there with members of the Committee and we talked to prosecutors there. The first question they asked was, “Are you coming to talk about the European arrest warrant?” We said, “Yes we are, because we are really concerned. Why are the Polish judges issuing so many warrants when, in our view, they are not merited?” These warrants undermine the principle of the EAW when they are issued for such trivial reasons as the theft of a wheelbarrow. Obviously, it is extremely important for the person who has lost the wheelbarrow, but in the whole history of the world, to coin a phrase of the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg), it is not that important—it is certainly not worth £20,000. So more work needs to be done.

Even when that work is done, the Committee is very clear that we must have a separate vote on the EAW. We are happy to have the package as a whole put before the House. I am not sure how many of these 35 measures can go through the House within a parliamentary day, but we draw a line in the sand about the EAW: Parliament is concerned about it and we therefore need a vote.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

We could debate all 35, with a full day’s debate for each one—we are not exactly overwhelmed with business.

[Keith Vaz]

That is a good point, but luckily I do not have control of the parliamentary day. These are representations we need to make, and we will see what the will of Parliament is. Let us recall some earlier ministerial words:

“I hope that today I have conveyed to the House not only the Government’s full commitment to holding a vote on the 2014 decision in this House and the other place, but the importance that we will accord to Parliament in the process leading up to that vote.”—[Official Report, 15 October 2012; Vol. 551, c. 35.]

It could be that Members want a vote on each of the 35 measures, but the Committee definitely wants a vote on the EAW, because we think it stands out in the business that the Home Secretary and Justice Secretary are currently discussing in the EU.

I welcome what is being proposed on Europol, and the Committee is a great fan of Rob Wainwright, the British head of Europol, who is doing a terrific job. Anyone who has visited Europol will have seen the work being done there, which is impressive and effective, and helps in the fight against organised crime. Europol works well with Interpol, although I know comments were made about Interpol. I and others have visited Interpol, which provides a huge benefit to cross-border action against serious and organised crime, illegal migration, people trafficking and all the other issues about which the House is very concerned. At the moment, there are 3,600 internationally active organised crime gangs operating across Europe. We cannot deal with those on our own, especially as far as cyber-crime is concerned; we have to deal with them through Europol. The Home Secretary is right to opt back in to those proceedings. I am not sure about one or two of the other Europol decisions, but if we are going to have further discussions, we will raise those at that stage.

[Sir William Cash]

In this context, does the right hon. Gentleman regard Albania’s candidacy for the European Union with equanimity? [Interruption.]

[Keith Vaz]

I apologise, but I could not hear the hon. Gentleman because the hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Sir Richard Shepherd) was muttering so I was looking at him. I wonder whether the hon. Member for Stone would repeat that.

[Sir William Cash]

I just wanted to know whether, in the context of the issues of justice and home affairs and all the matters we are discussing today, the right hon. Gentleman regards with equanimity the proposed candidacy for EU membership of Albania, given its very serious crime, trafficking and all the rest of it.

[Keith Vaz]

Anyone can apply to join the club; we do not mind people wanting to apply to join. The problem is that there are serious issues for all applicant countries to address, and Albania has to recognise that there is a big problem with organised gangs operating from there. A huge amount of work still needs to be done before Albania becomes a full member of the EU, and the hon. Gentleman is right to focus on that. Let me touch on what we must do with applicant countries—here is a mea culpa, if I am allowed to make one on behalf of the previous Government. Those of us who were enthusiastic about enlargement of the EU—I still am—should have realised that once a country has joined we tend to allow it just to continue on its own, without providing the support—not financial support, but all the other support—needed to make it a full member of the EU. That is why we need to work with countries throughout this period. We always invite countries to join, but when they are in we leave them on their own, and that is a mistake. There is a lot of work to do on Albania, and I am sure the Albanians understand that and are going to have a lot of help along the way.

I am glad that we are opting in to the European criminal records information system, because it allows the courts to make the right decision on those who appear before them. We need to know when dangerous criminals are coming into our country, which is why it is good that we are opting in to that measure. I am sure the Justice Secretary welcomes the prisoner transfer agreement, because he has worked hard to get it going. Two of the top three countries in respect of the 10,695 foreign prisoners we have in our prisons, who are costing us £300 million, are EU countries—Poland and Ireland. Anything that helps us work with European colleagues to make sure that people go back to their country to serve their sentences is to be welcomed.

I welcome the progress that is being made. We must have another debate in Parliament. The process of scrutiny must continue, but at the end of the day there has to be a vote on these measures, as the Government have promised, and specifically on the EAW. That is the strong feeling of every member of the Home Affairs Committee, and I hope I have conveyed that to the House today.