Brexit: European Arrest Warrant (European Union Committee)

Lord O'Neill of Clackmannan Excerpts

Thursday 8th February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Neill of Clackmannan (Lab)]

My Lords, the referendum campaign, when it was not concerned with economic matters, dealt with such issues as freedom from Brussels and release from the Court of Justice yoke. The leave campaigners were concerned with reclaiming our ability to make our own laws, coupled with a reduction in immigration and a greater ability to expel foreigners who broke the law.

These slogans slipped easily off the tongue of the law and order brigade. The impression was created that the EU was somehow a source of lawless anarchy on the streets of Britain. Even allowing for the fact that much of this nonsense was believed by elderly voters, and the fact that the European Court of Justice had become the highest court of appeal, there was little to justify the claptrap that surrounded this issue—to the extent that it was considered at all.

However, the misguided strategies of the remain campaign resulted in little attention being paid to the benefits of EU membership in police co-operation, smoother jurisdiction processes and, in particular, the EAW. When this committee took evidence on the warrant procedure—I am indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Jay, for his succinct presentation of our findings—it became abundantly clear that it had been a great success. It enabled speedier repatriation of the accused from one member country to another. We were able to extradite accused prisoners from the UK and secure the return of others from other member countries more quickly. Put simply, we were able to get rid of the bad guys we did not want and get the bad guys we did into court as quickly as we could. In the past this process had taken months or even years, and now we were talking in terms of days and weeks.

There had to be safeguards, and the final one was the right to appeal to the European Court of Justice. But, in the eyes of the Brexiteers, this is a kangaroo court dominated by foreigners. It was against that background that the committee took evidence which informed our report. I have sat on Select Committees in both Houses of Parliament for the best part of 25 years, and I have to say that I have never been on a committee where the weight of evidence was so overwhelmingly in favour of the European arrest warrant. I have been on committees where the arguments were finely balanced and there were possibilities for debate—but here we had an almost frighteningly monolithic response to the questions that we were asking.

What became clear was that, in the eyes of our witnesses, the EAW was a good thing, that something similar should be retained after departure from the EU, and that this was not going to be easy to achieve since the only two countries that had arrangements—namely, Iceland and Norway—had arrangements that had never been put into practice or really tested. Even then, those countries were members of the European Economic Area and part of the Schengen agreement; you might say that they were almost in the EU but not quite, and there was not the antipathy towards the EU that there could well be in a post-Brexit Britain. The fact is that the arrangements developed for Iceland and Norway took an incredibly long time and, despite the rigour of that process, have never been tested.

When we presented the report, we got a response from the Government that was, at best, Panglossian blind optimism and, at worst, convoluted obfuscation. It was quite appalling. In the rather more robust surroundings of the other end of the Palace, we probably would have had in the wretched civil servants who wrote the response to explain it to us—and, as we used to get in primary school English when I was in Scotland in the 1950s, “parse the following”. We would have had to get them to explain the convoluted nonsense. The fact is that there is quite a clear reason for this—because there is no easy answer, if there is an answer at all. We cannot have an acceptable set of legal procedures that sit easily alongside the Court of Justice but do not give the Court of Justice its due place in the eyes of the 27—or, for that matter, the eyes of the 29, because we are also talking about Iceland and Norway here.

If there is any issue on which the Brexiteers have now been shown to have no clothes whatever, it is this one—and, if they want to get dressed, they will have to move a long way and will have to reconsider their opposition to the European Court of Justice as the starting point. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say. Although I have great respect for him, I suspect that the text that he will have to read out today will be little better than the dreadful letter that we had in response to our evidence.