Police and Justice Bill

I rise to support everything that has been said by the three Members who have spoken. My hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) made the speech that I should have liked to make in the debate. He covered the issues lucidly and made his points persuasively, and I should simply like to add some brief remarks. First, I want to put things in context. Until 11 September 2001, we were pretty relaxed about extradition. Cases were dragging through our courts, where the French had requested the extradition of someone whom they thought was involved in the Paris metro bombings. The Americans had also requested the extradition of three people whom they thought were involved in the east African embassy bombings. Those cases were strung out through our courts. No one in the Government seemed at all worried about the fact that Rachid Ramda had been in prison for six and half years by then. I think that he has now finally been sent to France. I do not think that the three people whom the United States wanted have been sent there. No one in the Government—or, I agree, in the Opposition for that matter—was particularly worried about that at the time. Since 9/11, we seem to have gone into a panic. We have all signed up to the European arrest warrant, which has thrown out of the window all sorts of protections that we have had for ages, and we have apparently done the same with the United States. I simply do not understand why. I can understand that we needed far faster extradition proceedings, particularly in terrorism cases, because we were all very worried about them, but in the process we have thrown out all sorts of common law protections that have existed for absolutely ages, including dual criminality and the prima facie rule. There were two occasions on which the Home Secretary had to agree to the proceedings going ahead, each of which was subject to two appeals. I forget how many stages that process involved—seven or eight in the end—but they are reason why such cases often took so long. But why did we have to throw out all the existing protections? There was a perfectly good reason for dual criminality, and we have retained it in the treaty with the United States and in the European arrest warrant for those offences that are not included in the treaty list. I accept that we gave up the prima facie rule under an earlier Council of Europe treaty with our European partners and neighbours, but there was a backstop in that, at the end of the day, the Home Secretary was entitled to ask whether it was in the interest of justice that such rules could be disapplied. Various legal protections were built in. I can understand the case for eliminating some of the protections. Perhaps the Home Secretary’s discretion should have related to some fairly narrow points—the interest of justice, for instance—and perhaps he should have been able to exercise that discretion only once. Perhaps the prima facie rule could have been done away with in some cases. I have, however, always been worried about doing away with dual criminality. I do not understand how someone can be extradited from this country and prosecuted in another country if what they did was not an offence here at the time. However, we have now got ourselves into that position with the United States through the backdoor by allowing the prima facie evidence rule to be eroded. In so doing, we have effectively eroded the dual criminality rule as well. I do not understand why we went into a panic in September 2001, which resulted in the European arrest warrant, the treaty with the United States and the Extradition Act 2003. Many hon. Members made a great many of those points in considering the European arrest warrant and the Bill in Committee, but the Government were deaf to those arguments. Secondly, I want to deal with the US position. We got to this point as a result of bad negotiation, quite frankly. The Government did not foresee that the United States might not ratify the treaty. Anyone who has watched its refusal to extradite IRA terrorists over the past 30 years surely cannot be surprised that that is the main reason why ratification is being held up in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by a couple of Senators, probably from New York and Massachusetts, who do not want to risk former terrorists who may still be living peacefully in San Francisco or somewhere else being extradited back here. If we did not foresee that, it is a terrible mistake, but if we did, why did we not build into the treaty something to deal with it—or why cannot we do so now? If that is the problem, why cannot we try to renegotiate the treaty now. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) said, the United States now has no incentive to ratify the treaty. What bothers me is that all this is set in the context of a lot of other issues. No Conservative Member, possibly barring my right hon. and learned Friend, could be more pro-American than I am, but I am deeply concerned that we have allowed ourselves to be put in the position not just of a junior partner, but one without any influence. There is a raft of things on which we are not getting what we want from the United States—the international traffic in arms regulations waiver, the second engine on, and the guarantee of the order for, the joint strike fighter, as well as the ratification of the treaty. I go to Washington about once or twice a year, and many of those things have been on that list for about nine or 10 years, and the Americans keep saying that something is happening, but it does not. The fact is that the Government are not taken seriously because they are lousy at negotiating. They give away their position up front and do not retain any cards to play at the end of the game when things get difficult. That is what has happened in this case. The Minister is new to the job and I ask him to think seriously about the points that have been made. I hope that he is listening, because I do not think that this is a party political issue.