Justice and Home Affairs: United Kingdom Opt-Outs

Lord Inglewood Excerpts

Thursday 17th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Inglewood (Con)]

My Lords, I shall make only a short intervention in today’s debate. I chair your Lordships’ post-legislative scrutiny committee on the Extradition Act 2003. We are at a very early stage in our work. We have heard some evidence but we have reached no provisional conclusions at all. However, one thing is absolutely clear to us. The effect of not opting back in to the European arrest warrant is to tear up Part 1 of the Act. There is no time now to put in place any form of alternative arrangements for the countries listed in Part 1 of the Act—our European Union colleagues—because the legal status quo ante no longer exists.

We have heard plenty of criticisms about the domestic implementation of the framework decision directive and of the framework decision directive itself. However, there are other ways of dealing with that other than simply not opting back in.

In the real world, the only way open for us to continue to have extradition arrangements with our closest neighbours, with whom we have freedom of movement, is to opt back in. Not to do so in practice will precipitate anarchy. To do that would be very foolhardy, to put it in parliamentary language.