Police and Justice Bill

My hon. and learned Friend makes an important point. These matters need to be made much clearer. Decisions are being made about whether to prosecute and about where to prosecute, and they get tangled up together. Judge Workman, in his judgment of 17 May 2005 in the case of Babar Ahmad, commented that this was"““a difficult and troubling case””," and that"““the defendant is a British subject who is alleged to have committed offences which, if the evidence were available, could have been prosecuted in this country””." It is not clear to me whether the Crown Prosecution Service made a decision that that case was not prosecutable in this country, but that Babar Ahmad could still be extradited, or whether it decided that he could be prosecuted but—we must allow for this possibility—that it would be more appropriate for him to be prosecuted in another jurisdiction. The criteria by which that important set of judgments was made should be made much more public than they are at the moment. This whole story suggests that there is a great deal that is not really very good about the way in which we conclude treaties and scrutinise them in this place. [Hon. Members: ““Hear, hear.””] The hon. Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) has made this point a number of times. Equally, we should not seek fundamentally to amend the Extradition Act 2003 on the basis of an individual concern about an individual treaty. Perhaps we need to step back from this process and examine how we could do these things better in the future, but we should not support the Lords amendments this afternoon.