Police and Justice Bill

My Lords, I am most grateful to all noble Lords who have spoken in this debate. I want to spend one or two minutes responding to some of the points that were raised. The noble Lord, Lord Morgan, referred to the very high standard in the United States of protection of individual rights. I entirely agree. The United States, through its constitution and the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court, has a record which is second to none in protecting individual rights. My criticism was not of the standard of rights in the United States. It was the fact that the Government, through this treaty, would be prepared to accept a lower standard for citizens facing extradition in this country than United States’ citizens would face when we sought to extradite them from the United States. That was the point I was seeking to make. The noble Lord also, quite rightly, drew the attention of your Lordships’ House to the nature of modern crime and the difficulties that we face in trying to defeat it. I also entirely accept that argument, which the whole debate, for example, about control orders, which took place about 18 months ago, was about. However, just because there are new sorts of crime, that does not mean we should surrender all the hard fought-for liberties of the individual in this country. We should test them very carefully against the new challenges to see whether they need to be modified, not simply abjectly to surrender them because there is a new crime that we do not recognise.