It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friends the Members for Daventry (Chris Heaton-Harris) and for Esher and Walton (Mr Raab), with whom I am in almost entire agreement.
As a brief aside, if the House will indulge me, I think one can take back the divergence between our legal system and that of the continent to the Fourth Lateran Council and Innocent III’s view that it was wrong for priests to stand and bless trial by combat. From that, our different systems developed.
On the substance of the documents in front of us, the key is that the Lisbon treaty provided that a European public prosecutor’s office should be developed from Eurojust, which article 86(1) stated could go ahead by enhanced co-operation. In coming forward with these proposals, therefore, the Commission is starting from a very good treaty base, from its point of view. Fortunately, however, we have an equally good treaty base for rejecting it—our ability to opt in or not. I raise the flag of concern about what this whole process is about, and I urge the Government, regardless of the negotiations, not to opt in at the end of them, because it is all about creating a single form of justice within the EU, as my hon. Friend the Member for Daventry said.
The degree of competence being created for Eurojust is extremely wide and is set out in annex 1 of the documents before us, which lists the forms of serious crime that Eurojust is competent to deal with in accordance with article 3(1). I will read the list out, as that has not yet been done, because it is important to understand how all-encompassing the list is: organised crime; terrorism; drug trafficking; money laundering; corruption; crime against the financial interests of the union; murder, grievous bodily injury, kidnapping, illegal restraint and hostage taking; sexual abuse and sexual exploitation of women and children, child pornography and solicitation of children for sexual purposes; racism and xenophobia; organised robbery; motor vehicle crime; swindling and fraud; racketeering and extortion; counterfeiting and product piracy; forgery of administrative documents and trafficking therein; forgery of money and means of payment; computer crime; insider dealing and financial market manipulation; illegal immigrant smuggling; trafficking in human beings; illicit trade in human organs and tissue; illicit trafficking in hormonal substances and other growth promoters; illicit trafficking in cultural goods, including antiquities and works of art; illicit trafficking in arms, ammunition and explosives; illicit
trafficking in endangered animal species; illicit trafficking in endangered plant species and varieties; environmental crime; ship-source pollution; crime connected with nuclear and radioactive substances; and genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. While some of those are undoubtedly extremely serious and have cross-border connotations, others are essentially national crimes that are most unlikely to have any international connotations. Tiresome though it might be, if one’s car radio is stolen, it is hard to see how that motor crime would have a particular effect on the good people of Luxembourg.
The list goes on, because the proposed regulation coming from the EU allows Eurojust to cover related criminal offences, so it has the ability to go further than this already extensive list. I would argue that the Eurojust proposal contains a very wide set of competences and that Eurojust has significant power of its own. It can exercise its tasks at the request of the competent authorities of member states or, crucially, on its own initiative; it does not require a member state to intervene to set the wheels in motion that would lead to investigations taking place.
The Commission sets out in its document that competent national authorities shall respond without undue delay to Eurojust’s requests and opinions made under article 4, which sets out the basis on which they may make such requests. What is being proposed will give Eurojust a very wide set of competences and an ability to demand responses. I am well aware that the Government’s concern over the directive is that there may be orders coming from member states to direct investigations in the UK and that they believe that that would be unsatisfactory. Eurojust itself does not get that direct power, but it is not very far from it, because national authorities have to respond without undue delay. Although they can cite operational reasons of an unspecified kind as to why they will not provide co-operation, that will be justiciable by the Court of Justice of the European Union. That seems to me to be a very major extension of the competence of the European Union into the criminal justice field.
On the composition of Eurojust—I may have misunderstood this—it is surprising that it is not composed according to the ordinary rules of qualified majority voting, but by simple majority of the members of the college. The members of the college will be one representative of each member state, each of whom will have, according to article 10, a single vote. It would mean that the UK, if we were to opt in to this set of proposals, could be outvoted without even having the benefit of the extra weighting to our vote. The college is set up to maximise the power of the centre against the countries. The proposals give enormously wide control to Eurojust even if the Government’s queries on direct orders from other members and the relationship with the European public prosecutor’s office are answered. That is a fundamental step in reversing—you will be horrified to hear, Madam Deputy Speaker— the differences that developed in 1215 with the Fourth Lateran Council.
7.56 pm