EU Justice and Home Affairs Measures

Debate between Oliver Heald and Graham Stringer

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.