EU Justice and Home Affairs Measures

Keith Vaz Excerpts

Wednesday 19th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend is right. It would have been so simple to cover those measures in the initial debate on a straightforward motion tabled by the Government. I think that it is unprecedented that the Opposition table what should be a Government motion and ask the Government to vote with us on the very measures that they supported in the first place.

The 24 measures include football banning orders, which we welcome, to stop hooligans travelling to matches in Europe. We need to participate in Eurojust to gather evidence on cross-border crime. We need Europol to support and co-ordinate cross-border investigations. We need co-operation to prevent drug trafficking, and we need the European Police College to share best practice.

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I am most grateful to my right hon. Friend for giving way and hope that she will excuse me for interrupting her. She is clearly on a roll, because I cannot remember a time on which the Home Secretary has written to my right hon. Friend to say that she will support one of her measures. When the Select Committee on Home Affairs considered the matter, we suggested that the vote should have happened much earlier and that the House should have voted to give the Government a mandate to negotiate, rather than it being left to the last moment. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we should really have discussed these matters a long time before?

[Yvette Cooper]

My right hon. Friend is right. The truth is that the Home Secretary’s handling of the whole thing has been chaotic from start to finish. We have had no proper opportunity to debate the subject and have a vote at the right time and we have had confusion about when we were going to have the votes at the wrong time. We had parliamentary confusion, votes in chaos, Tory MPs scuttling back from their dinners, champagne banquets abandoned and a humiliated Prime Minister returning to the House of Commons with his tails between his legs.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mrs May]

I apologise to the hon. Gentleman but I cannot remember whether he was in the Chamber for the debate a week ago on Monday. However, I made exactly these sorts of argument in that debate. Other right hon. and hon. Members would have been able to express their concerns about or support for the European arrest warrant had that debate not been curtailed by his Front-Bench team.

[Keith Vaz]

Could the Home Secretary clarify one point? Has she notified the European Union that we are opting in already, is she waiting for this vote, or did she do so after last week’s vote?

[Mrs May]

We have not yet notified the European Union. [Interruption.] Someone says, “Why?” It is partly because the timetable has not required us to notify the European Union by that point.

Thirdly, under the convention, we would return to a system where 22 other member states would not extradite their own nationals to the UK and where, owing to constitutional bars, there would be no hope of that situation changing for some countries. In the last five years alone, those 22 states have extradited 105 of their own nationals to us to stand trial. That would end if we returned to the 1957 convention, and victims, and their families, would suffer as a result.

The convention would also mean that, if there is a long delay between the offence occurring and the extradition request being made, extradition can be refused because of the length of time that has passed under a state’s statute of limitations.

--- Later in debate ---

[Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)]

I thank the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper), for giving the House this opportunity to discuss the European arrest warrant. I know that others claim we discussed it last week, but frankly the proceedings then were totally shambolic. Bearing in mind the fact that the Home Affairs Committee published its report on this matter on 29 October last year, in which it called on the Government to ensure that Parliament had as much say in this process as possible, it is a huge disappointment that it is only now—12 days before 1 December, the date on which we have to opt in—that Parliament has a real opportunity to discuss these matters.

I am an admirer of the Home Secretary and of her work on the landscape of policing. When she leaves her office when Parliament ends on 30 March, she will be able to point to the real changes she has made in that area. I have to say to her, however, that this has not been the Home Office’s finest hour. We had a real opportunity last week to give Members the chance to discuss the European arrest warrant, but that was not possible because of the shenanigans surrounding the motion and the vote.

[Sir William Cash]

The Home Affairs Select Committee has done a splendid job, but will the right hon. Gentleman also acknowledge the fact that the Justice Committee—not to mention the European Scrutiny Committee—has played a pivotal role in ensuring that we have at least examined these matters?

[Keith Vaz]

I was just about to say that. I do not want this to sound like self-congratulation—[Hon. Members: “Oh yes you do!”] Oh, all right—I do! I concede that point. To have united the three Chairs of the Select Committees and all their members, given their different politics and personalities, is a unique achievement for any Government. I am minded to join those on the two Front Benches in the Division Lobby to support the motion, if only to see the Home Secretary and the shadow Home Secretary in the same Lobby at the same time—I am not sure who will get there first—but I shall not be voting tonight. I am sure that my extra vote would not count for much anyway, given that the motion will be passed, but this is the only way I have of expressing my exasperation at the insufficient time we have had to discuss these matters or to look in real detail at the European arrest warrant.

The Home Secretary is right to say that there have been changes since we started last year, but those changes do not go far enough to deal with the kinds of issues that were raised in the Select Committee by several Members, including the Lord Chancellor and Secretary of State for Justice, the right hon. Member for Epsom and Ewell (Chris Grayling), and the hon. Members for Enfield North (Nick de Bois) and for South Dorset (Richard Drax), all of whom came and talked about specific examples.

I am not against the principle of the European arrest warrant. The Home Secretary and the shadow Home Secretary have made a powerful case in support of that principle. The problem lies in the practicalities involved and the difficulty in exercising any control—we have none—over jurisdictions in other countries. Poland has been mentioned. We have had more European arrest warrant requests from Poland—2,400—than from any other country in Europe. The Home Secretary says that Poland is changing its legislation.

[Sir Tony Baldry]

The fact is that these are mostly for Poles going back to Poland—they want their own Poles back—and they are not for our citizens.

[Keith Vaz]

Of course if the Poles want the Poles back, they should have them back. The problem is that Poland is issuing these arrest warrants because it does not do so when it is prosecution-ready; a judge has no jurisdiction in these matters and these things are just issued, no matter what the case is. We cannot intervene in Polish legislation to try to change that position. The right hon. Gentleman talks about Poland having the Poles back. There are 1,000 Polish people in our prisons as foreign national prisoners and if Poland wanted them back I am sure the Home Secretary would be delighted to send them back to Poland. However, they are still in our prisons.

The fact is that these practicalities do stand in the way of justice. As Lady Hale said in the case of PH, HH and FK, this rests, in the end, with the other national countries of the European Union; it does not rest with us. So no matter what we do in the House today, those practical difficulties remain. I know that successive Governments have tried hard to change the situation, but we cannot intervene in the legislation of other countries. That is why we get these absurd cases where European arrest warrants are issued for people without the need to hand them out. The figures show that 28% of people arrested in our country are foreign nationals, half of whom are from the European Union. The cost of executing a European arrest warrant is £20,000—it costs that each time. The figures for arrests and surrenders show 5,184 arrests and 4,005 surrenders, so we are talking about 1,179 more arrests than surrenders.

That is why we needed an early debate on this matter. We do not need to go right up to the wire, with 12 days to go before the end of these discussions. Parliament, especially constituency MPs, who have real issues to raise, should have had the opportunity to raise this matter before. I am sorry that the Government did not listen to what my Committee said clearly a year ago, in paragraphs 85 and 87 of its report. Paragraph 87 stated:

“To date”—

this was a year ago—

“we have been disappointed with the extent and timeliness of the Government’s involvement of Parliament in scrutinising the 2014 opt-out and proposed opt-in. We hope that it will engage more constructively with Parliament for the remainder of this process.”

Now, with 12 days to go, we have our first real debate on this issue, thanks to the shadow Home Secretary tabling this motion.

We have just been told by the Home Secretary that she has not even notified the European Union that we are going to opt in. Bearing in mind the paperwork involved and the way in which the Home Office deals with its paperwork, I have a suggestion to make to the right hon. Lady: when she signs her letter, she should give it to the hon. Members for Hexham (Guy Opperman) and for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery), who are sitting behind her, and make sure that they take it straight to the European Union headquarters in Brussels. Otherwise, given the history of the Home Office, this deadline will be missed, like so many others.

I hope the Home Secretary will, in her wind-up, further reassure the House that the points made by Members of this House in their evidence to my Select Committee and the reports the three Select Committees have issued will be taken even more seriously than they have been in the past.