Police and Justice Bill

I am sorry. I was looking at the wrong Minister. Perhaps she is not so new to the job. I ask her to think seriously about this issue, because British citizens are being put at risk of serious injustice. The case of Ian Norris involves price fixing, which was not a criminal offence here at the time when he committed it. If the dual criminality rule were properly applied, he could not be extradited to the United States for it. However, because the United States can pick up on an offence for which there is dual criminality and charge him with that, it can apply the weak prima facie evidence test that is now in the treaty. I suggest that, inadvertently, the treaty with the United States and the Extradition Act 2003 are resulting in—and will continue to result in—serious miscarriages of justice in which innocent British citizens are put through extradition and a court procedure in the United States that they should not be put through. If the proper protections were in place, they would not be put through that. The Government must be galled that the United States Senate refuses to ratify the treaty, but they have it in their hands to accept the amendments, or something like them, and simply put the favourable treatment that the United States gets on hold—in abeyance, in escrow, or whatever one wants to call it—until the United States performs its side of the bargain. We would not have so much trouble then. However, I suspect that the United States will not ever implement its side of the bargain and that at some point we will have to renegotiate if we want to get the United States to sign up to a new treaty. Perhaps the sooner we get there, the better. In pursuit of the interests of justice, I hope that the Government will consider the matter again. They should not feel that it would be a terrible climbdown or loss of political machoism to admit that a mistake has been made. They can blame the United States. They need to find some way out of the problem that we have been led into by the Extradition Act 2003.