It is a pleasure to speak in this debate and to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab). His arguments were well put and I completely agree with them. I will try not to copy him too much, but he nailed the point that this measure is completely tied to the European public prosecutor’s office. It is a building block of it, and a morphing of what Eurojust was originally set up to do, taking it much further than any of us in this House would like.
In last week’s debate, we did not get to the issue of what exactly the European public prosecutor’s office is, probably because the Minister asked us not to stray into that territory. According to the European Union, the European public prosecutor’s office will be a
“prosecution office of the European Union with exclusive competence for investigating, prosecuting and bringing to judgment crimes against the EU budget.”
Those last few words are the most important.
For the best part of two decades, the European Commission’s budget has not received a positive statement of assurance from the European Court of Auditors. A lot of money is wasted in maladministration, but a large sum also disappears through fraud, which has caused consternation in some circles for some time. People have, in the past, blown the whistle on areas where money has been filtered away illegally. The problem goes back to before 1999. Those of us who were involved in European affairs back then will remember that the Jacques Santer Commission fell in 1999 because of a scandal involving a failure to chase down fraud, and the ignoring of whistleblowers and internal fraud. When the Commission fell, there was a marked panic in European circles and a committee of independent experts was set up. That reported in March 1999 and again in September 1999 after the European elections of that year.
Before 1999, there was an anti-fraud organisation in the European Commission called UCLAF, which after 1999 morphed into a similar anti-fraud organisation called OLAF. Its job was to chase down fraud, both internal and external, and to protect the financial interests of communities in and across the European Union. It was a simple transfer of powers from UCLAF to OLAF—alas, several members of staff also made the transfer—but OLAF did not really succeed in doing its job of chasing fraud for some time. Indeed, it tended to chase whistleblowers before it actually chased fraudsters who chose to defraud the European Union.
All the time, the fraud figures for the European Union kept climbing. Some say it was as high as €500 million, although some would say it was even more. The question for this debate is why the big leap from having an anti-fraud office, which already has the powers to do the job within the context of the existing treaties, to something that would take a huge amount of powers away from member states? Why the huge power-grab?
Alongside the proposal for a European public prosecutor’s office, the Commission has also published a communication on its ideas for OLAF in the future. It plans to table legislative proposals to alter the OLAF regulation in due course. As it happens, the Council and the European Parliament have only just agreed a revision to the 1999 OLAF regulation, which has been more than 10 years in the making. A key aim of that is to strengthen OLAF, the anti-fraud office of the European Union, and its investigative capabilities, and also to provide greater safeguards for those being investigated. The Commission’s proposals for the European public prosecutor’s office, however, would entail OLAF losing the powers to conduct investigations into fraud against the EU budget and being limited to investigations on other irregularities involving EU funds and misconduct or crimes committed by EU personnel that do not have a financial impact. It is gutting powers, which the European public prosecutor would use, from an existing body, because it wants an EPP with more powers. It is the precursor to this area of criminal justice that my hon. Friend the Member for Esher and Walton talked about. The European Scrutiny Committee, of which I am a member, noted the proposal to amend OLAF regulation and concluded:
“We are disappointed to see that so soon after reform of OLAF’s regulatory framework has been agreed, the Commission, without waiting to see the impact of that reform, is suggesting
further legislation including the creation of an EPPO. The Commission refers to this pre-emptive approach to policy-making and legislative reform somewhat euphemistically as ‘step-by-step’ when it seems more like leaps and bounds.”
This is a case of leaps and bounds. We would have to change a number of things that we hold dear in our common law system. We have no arrest without evidence. The European public prosecutor will operate under a system of corpus juris, so that one can be arrested without evidence. We do not hold suspects for more than a fixed and limited time unless charges are presented in open court. Under corpus juris, a person can be held indefinitely. In our system, we believe we have the right to face one’s accuser and see evidence. Under corpus juris, the accuser may be anonymous and no right for the accused to see the evidence exists. We like to be tried by lay magistrates in most cases, have the right to trial of a jury of one’s peers and have an adversarial model. That is not the case under corpus juris, where a person is tried by professional judges, there is no right to trial by jury and there is an inquisitorial model. We like an open court. It is a closed court under corpus juris. We like the presumption of innocence until proven guilty.