First, Madam Deputy Speaker, may I apologise for missing the start of the Home Secretary’s speech because of a meeting with a Minister which had been arranged before today’s timings were affected by the earlier statement? I am very glad to follow my colleague the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz). We have worked together, along with the Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee, to try to improve the way Parliament is able to address these matters. It has been a struggle, and the outcome in terms of the process is still far from satisfactory, but we have reached this point and we are having this debate. There will be a debate and a vote or votes at a later stage—we are still unclear as to what that procedure will be. This has at times been like getting blood out of a stone, and I do not think that is particularly in the Government’s interests. I appreciate some of the problems that they face, but in order to obtain parliamentary support they need to give Parliament the opportunities to feel confident that it has been able to examine things properly. I am therefore glad that we now have the Command Paper, which includes all the impact assessments. It would have been very helpful to have had those much earlier, and of course we still do not have the impact assessments on those measures the Government do not propose to enter—perhaps those would have helped to illuminate the Government’s reasons for the decisions they made.
There are no changes in the opt-ins in the Ministry of Justice field; the changes are in the much larger number of measures that come within the Home Office’s sphere. The Justice Committee has therefore already examined and reached conclusions on the measures, and it is unlikely to do a great deal more on the issue between
now and the later stages of consideration. We published a report, and the Government are still pursuing a view with which we broadly agree, and I will explain why.
The measures include six mutual recognition measures, including one on financial penalties that originated with the United Kingdom and Sweden. There are measures on previous convictions, prisoner transfers, judgments in absentia and European supervision orders. The Government propose to rejoin all those measures with one exception, which is the probation measures framework decision, to which I will return. The Committee agrees that the Government were right, in the national interest and in the interest of effective cross-border co-operation, to seek to rejoin five of the measures.
The Committee of course strongly supports the UK’s participation in the prisoner transfer framework decision because it is a priority to reduce the number of foreign nationals held in UK prisons. That decision is also an important part of the overall package for reforming the European arrest warrant. The Committee is particularly conscious of the problems presented by the large number of foreign nationals in UK prisons. Those are nationals from many countries in UK prisons, and the Government must continue their efforts in relation to those countries. With European countries, however, there is a much better prospect of achieving a prisoner’s return to their native country because we are not dealing with countries in which human rights considerations, on the face of it, would appear to prevent a return.
One of the five measures, the European supervision order, enables a defendant or suspect on non-custodial pre-trial bail or other supervision to return to their home member state to await trial there under supervision, and we support and welcome that measure. The probation measures framework decision provides the basis for mutual recognition and supervision of suspended sentences, post-custodial licences and community sentences, and the Committee noted the Government’s concerns about the measure’s operation:
“In view of the potential value of the Framework Decision we consider that the Government should pursue the matter in their negotiations on the opt-in list to see whether these concerns can be dealt with. We would not wish to rule out participation in the measure if concerns about its drafting can be overcome”.
We discovered from another source that a solution to that problem is alleged to have been found. The source was a press release issued by the General Affairs Council on 24 June, from which it appears that the Government have undertaken to consider opting back in to two Prüm decisions and the probation measures framework decision at a later stage.
In evidence to our Committee on 9 July, the Lord Chancellor admitted that he had been pressed by the Commission to rejoin the probation measures framework decision, arguing that it was closely linked to the prisoner transfer agreement. He repeated the objections that he had previously expressed to the Committee, particularly that we do not have much experience of the measure’s operation in other countries and the legal problems that it might cause. He said that the solution reached in the negotiations was that the UK would look at the matter again in the next Parliament to see whether rejoining would be in the national interest. It would have been preferable if the Government had volunteered information on that, either in correspondence or in a Command
Paper, instead of leaving it to Committees to glean information from Council press releases and media reports.
More generally, the Justice Committee supports the Government’s choice of measures to rejoin in the national interest and in the interest of fighting crime. We reached some agreement with the Government on minimum standards measures that set standards already met by the United Kingdom. We said that
“the arguments for opting into the…minimum standards measures are primarily symbolic, and our view is that those arguments do not outweigh the disadvantages of bringing wide areas of criminal justice in the UK unnecessarily into the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union.”
Many traditions in our judicial systems in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland are different from those that prevail in continental practice, and it therefore makes sense not to become involved in matters in the European Court of Justice when doing so does not serve the national interest. There is value in signing up to minimum standards measures if it has a persuasive effect in other countries, but the Committee’s view is that that is outweighed by the disadvantages of creating case law in the European Court of Justice on matters that do not need to be treated in that way.
The changes to the list of 35 measures do not appear to affect the overall balance of the package. Some of the changes are the consequence of measures ceasing to be subject to the block opt-out, and others, such as the additional measures on Europol and the Schengen information system, are ancillary to the Government’s decision to participate in Europol and the Schengen information system and may be regarded as necessary on the grounds of coherence and practical operability. It is interesting that the Government have achieved the conjuring trick of changing the list of measures while retaining the same total number. I suspect that has something to do with internal party management within the Conservative party, but the outcome for the balance of the measures will continue to be supported by the Committee. The measures that the Government have agreed to opt into will materially assist in the fight against serious crime and in the safeguarding of the freedom of our citizens. The Government have my support.
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