Sub-Saharan Africa (Corruption and the Economy)

Debate between Richard Fuller and Stephen Phillips

Wednesday 1st July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Phillips]

My hon. Friend is right. I cannot speak specifically about Rwanda, but unless and until all countries bear down on corruption, this will be a problem that endures.

Very little progress has been made since the Secretary-General made those remarks two years ago. Still the procurement managers sit in their air-conditioned offices marking the passage of time on their gold Rolexes; still corporate interests buy their way out of laws designed to protect the environment and to ensure that they pay proper amounts of taxation; still wealthy individuals and businesses ease their passage through difficult lawsuits by ensuring that the judiciary across Africa knows which side is more likely to pay more for the “right” result.

Let us take but one area. In its report “Making a Killing”, published this year, Save the Children estimated that the lost tax revenues to developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa due to illicit financial flows was in the order of $15 billion—a figure that dwarfs this country’s annual aid budget and would pay for 1.8 million healthcare workers. That is a loss of revenue to sub-Saharan Africa in just one area, which is largely made possible by a corruption that allows the maintaining of tax laws and treaties that favour rich corporations which are prepared to bribe Governments and parliamentarians to secure their favoured status. The report fails to take account of perhaps even larger revenues that are lost because a blind eye is turned—once it has been paid for—to direct tax evasion. That is morally wrong. It sustains endemic poverty, and, as I have said, it threatens our own security.

We are not without an international framework within which to deal with the issue. In 2003, the United Nations opened for signature the international anti-corruption convention, which the majority of countries in the world have now ratified. It established some common standards in relation to, for example, criminalisation and law enforcement in chapter III, and international co-operation in chapter IV. However, although monitoring finally began in about 2010, it has been patchy and inconsistent. It also suffers from the major failing that review takes place principally “in region”, thus opening up a whole new field to corruption as non-compliant countries with mutual interests are able to score one another for compliance. One issue that the Minister could usefully discuss with his counterparts in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is how the convention can be updated to ensure proper monitoring.

I believe that the OECD anti-bribery convention has been ratified by only 41 countries. What efforts are the Government making to ensure not only that it is more broadly adopted, but that it is actually enforced by those who have signed it? In its most recent report on the implementation of the convention in 2015, Transparency International found that there was “little or no enforcement” of it in many states, including the Republic of Ireland. There was “active enforcement” only in the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Switzerland.

The conventions are, however, only part of the solution. They assist in establishing common international standards, but without enforcement—or, for that matter, the institutions that are necessary to ensure enforcement—they are essentially meaningless.

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

My hon. and learned Friend has mentioned the Foreign Office and other Departments. Is he satisfied with the current position, or does he believe there is an opportunity for greater understanding and co-operation between the Foreign Office and the Department for International Development when it comes to tackling some of the problems that he is outlining?

[Stephen Phillips]

Co-operation between the two Departments is obviously critical. Indeed, the Government as a whole must focus on the need to bear down on corruption where it exists, whether here or anywhere else in the world.

One of the problems is that very little effort appears to have been devoted to ensuring that institution building is carried out by donors who too often prefer to focus on the sexier aspects of development, such as education and health—funding areas that are, in any event, losing more money than they are receiving because of the corruption that pervades the region. So it is, although he may not know it, that the Minister is funding education programmes which pay teachers who do not exist; so it is that he is paying for the planting of crops which cannot grow in soil that cannot be maintained; and so it is that he funds programmes as a result of which money routinely finds itself in the hands of the governing class, despite the best efforts of those in his Department who work so hard to ensure that that does not happen.

Unless and until there is an unrelenting focus on changing the institutional environment throughout sub-Saharan Africa, which at present there is not, very little will change. As Dr John Mukum Mbaku argued in his 2007 book on corruption in Africa,

“the institutional environment, not cultural norms, determine a society’s propensity to engage in corruption and other forms of opportunism ...The incentive structures that a country’s market participants face—which are determined by the country’s institutional arrangements, may create opportunities for corruption and provide an environment in which even honest and highly ethical individuals may be forced to engage in corrupt activities in order to survive. Such perverse incentive structures can be changed or modified through democratic constitutional reforms.”

UK Extradition Arrangements

Debate between Richard Fuller and Stephen Phillips

Monday 5th December 2011 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Phillips (Sleaford and North Hykeham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab) on securing this debate and on the fierce advocacy that he has deployed both in his speech this evening and generally in relation to this issue. There have been a number of powerful contributions from both sides of the House. The contribution on the European arrest warrant from my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West (Conor Burns) was particularly impressive. He said that he was not a lawyer and that being a politician was criminal enough in his constituency. All I can say is that I will not be taking my holiday in Bournemouth this year.

Extradition serves an extraordinarily useful function in the administration of criminal justice throughout the world. Merely fleeing a jurisdiction should not be equated with acquittal. It is very important that decent and proper extradition arrangements exist between civilised nations so that those who are accused of crimes, or at least of serious crimes, can be brought before the criminal courts of the jurisdiction in which those crimes are alleged to have been committed—provided of course that appropriate safeguards are in place, along the lines indicated by my right hon. Friend the Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis), to recognise that those accused of crimes are not guilty of those crimes until such time as a jury, or in some cases a judicial body, has said so. There was nothing more inimical to justice than the spectre, after the end of the second world war, of many war criminals who were guilty of genocide being able to travel to jurisdictions where there were no extradition arrangements with European nations, and in those circumstances being able to evade justice for a considerable period. During the debate, we should not lose sight of the fact that there are victims of crime who are as much entitled to justice as those who are accused of crimes and who are in fact innocent.

As has been recognised in the debate—we have begun to reach a consensus on both sides of the House—a balance needs to be struck between, on one hand, the protection of the fundamental right of a citizen not to be extradited abroad if there are inadequate safeguards to protect that citizen from an unfair trial and, on the other, the need to prosecute very serious crimes. A number of principles pervade this area of law but, given the events at the beginning of this century that led to the Extradition Act 2003, sufficient regard might not have been paid to them.

The first of those principles is that trivial offences should not trigger extradition at all. In circumstances such as some of those alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Bournemouth West, it is entirely inappropriate that any citizen be removed from his own jurisdiction, taken to a foreign place, perhaps not granted bail and locked up, and prosecuted for something that, on the face of things, is minor.

The second important principle is that of speciality, of which no mention has been made during this debate but which requires that the only offences with which someone extradited to a foreign jurisdiction can be charged be those for which he has been extradited in the first place. Two of the problems in this area that perhaps have not been properly grappled with by the Extradition Act are the absence of enforceable assurances from some countries seeking extradition from this country and the fact that the Home Secretary and the courts cannot take the principle of speciality properly into account in those circumstances.

There is also the principle that there should not be double jeopardy—that nobody should be tried twice for the same offence—save perhaps in limited circumstances. Again, I do not think that any mention has been made of that in the debate. Furthermore, there are principles surrounding the protection of people’s human rights—the principle that we do not require those domiciled in this country, regardless of whether they are citizens, to be extradited if they might face capital punishment. That was alluded to by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas)—although I could not agree with all her remarks about torture.

Two issues have arisen out of the 2003 Act. The first concerns the disparity—or lack of reciprocity—perceived to exist between the arrangements that we have in place for extradition to the United States and the arrangements that the United States has in place for the extradition to this country of those accused of crimes here. Notwithstanding what was said by the then Attorney-General, Baroness Scotland, when the commencement provisions of the 2003 Act were debated in the other place, I agree with the Baker report that there is little difference between the tests applied on this side of the Atlantic and on the other side. Fundamentally, there is no difference between probable cause and reasonable suspicion.

What so concerns our constituents—certainly in my constituency—and many lawyers is that whereas in the United States the fourth amendment to the constitution, which requires probable cause to be shown, requires that an extradition request go before a court, there is no such requirement in this country. In those circumstances, it is perceived—I think, perhaps, correctly—that citizens or anybody domiciled in this jurisdiction whose extradition is sought to the United States are being denied a right that they might otherwise have had.

The commencement of the forum provisions contained in the Police and Justice Act 2006, in so far as they amended the 2003 Act, would go some way to meeting these difficulties. I agree with the Joint Committee on Human Rights that it is difficult to understand why those provisions have not been commenced, including by the previous Government. Liberty obtained advice from leading counsel, Edward Fitzgerald and Julian Knowles, that no amendment to the treaty between this country and the United States would be required were those provisions to be commenced. I would like to hear from the Minister, therefore, that the Government will at the very least bring forward the commencement of those provisions.

[Richard Fuller (Bedford) (Con)]

My hon. and learned Friend is talking about the immediacy and the timing of some of these issues. That Babar Ahmad, who is the most pertinent example, has still not been brought to trial after seven years is further evidence of a scar on general jurisprudence in this country. Does that not give a sense of the importance of immediacy?

[Stephen Phillips]

I agree with my hon. Friend that it is a stain on justice in this country and, in my view, on justice in the United States that Babar Ahmad has been locked up for seven years. If Babar Ahmad wanted a trial, he could have one in the United States, but one of the great difficulties with forum issues is this: why on earth should he have to do so? Why should he be taken to a foreign jurisdiction, when the witnesses, the evidence and his legal representatives might be here, to defend himself against these very serious accusations? As the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion pointed out, these are very serious allegations indeed. I was horrified to hear her comments about the absence of evidence before the Crown Prosecution Service. I hope that that matter will be looked into and that the Minister will assure us that the evidence will be made available.

The other area of debate has been the European arrest warrant, the problem with which is that the standards of justice that prevail in this country and other countries in Europe, such as Ireland, Germany and France, are not necessarily those that prevail all over the European Union. I regret to say that I do not share the hope of the Joint Committee on Human Rights and the Baker report that the system will sort itself out. That is the triumph of hope over experience.