Police and Justice Bill

It is a genuine pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham). It must be a bitter-sweet experience for those on his Front Bench to see an intelligent and perceptive former Minister rise to make the kind of comments that he has just made. They have taken our discussion forward in a real sense. I rise to support the retention of the Lords amendments. That should not come as a surprise to the House, as we have been entirely consistent in our position on these matters ever since they were first put before the delegated legislation Committee on which I served and in which we voted against these provisions. We did so because we believed that they were an affront to what ought to be expected on behalf of British citizens in relation to the reciprocity of the agreements. In the interests of justice, and as far as British citizens were concerned, we felt that we should resist a one-sided treaty of this kind. We have not resiled from that position in any way since then. Listening to the debate on the issues, however, I have detected three convenient fictions that have been propagated since that time. The first is that those who oppose the treaty—and, therefore, the unequal provisions—are doing so in response to an expensive public relations campaign mounted on behalf of certain individuals, and that this is all a matter of the guilt or innocence, presumed or otherwise, of the NatWest three or, now, the chief executive of Morgan Crucible. That is emphatically not the case. My colleagues and I opposed this measure long before any of those cases were being considered, because we believed in the justice of the case that we were putting forward. I obviously hope that those British citizens are found not to have been guilty of the crimes of which they have been accused, but I have no way of knowing the guilt or innocence of those individuals. That is not for me to say; it is for a court to determine guilt or innocence. My job, and the job of all parliamentarians, is to consider the process by which our citizens face a court in a foreign land thousands of miles away on charges of questionable validity in this country.