My hon. Friend makes an important point. I heard somebody on the Government Front Bench muttering that there are different procedures in the House of Lords—different procedures that mean that they are allowed to vote on 35 measures, but we are allowed to vote on only 11? I have never heard anything so ludicrous.
The Home Secretary has been ducking and diving on this issue from the start. There are important measures in the 35 that we should be supporting and debating, and too many times the Home Secretary has tried to duck having a vote on them. The Schengen Information System II is vital and necessary. The recent Public Accounts Committee report that set out that there had been a 70% increase in delays in asylum claims also pointed out that the British Government have less information about criminals crossing our borders than other countries, and that is because we are not part of SIS II. The Home Secretary has not been able to join SIS II because she has been so busy renegotiating her opt-in, opt-out hokey-cokey for the sake of pandering to her Eurosceptic Back Benchers. We should be part of SIS II and we should be voting for it today.
The Association of Chief Police Officers has described the European arrest warrant as “an essential weapon”. Distinguished legal figures, including the former president of the Supreme Court, have argued that Britain also risks becoming a safe haven for fugitives from justice, a handful of them British citizens but the vast majority foreign nationals wanted for crimes elsewhere in Europe. They are right. For example, Zakaria Chadili from France was alleged to have travelled to Syria in late 2013 and undergone a month of training with a proscribed organisation. Instead of returning to France, he came to the UK and the French police wanted to arrest him. Between his first court appearance on 9 May and the orders for extradition on 13 June were just a few days, and he was surrendered on 25 June. In a similar case from 1995, before the European arrest warrant, Rachid Ramda, an Algerian national, was arrested in the UK in connection with a terrorist attack on the Paris transport system and it took 10 years to extradite him back to France.
The statistics are clear: the European arrest warrant helps us to deport foreign criminals and terrorists. More than 1,000 people were removed because of an arrest warrant last year. Of those people, 43 were UK nationals, eight of whom were connected to child sex offences. Since 2009, 500 people have been brought back to the UK to face British justice, including suspected child sex offenders and those suspected of murder, rape and drug trafficking, and more than 4,000 people have been removed, including more than 100 for murder, more than 300 for serious violence, more than 400 for drug trafficking and more than 500 for robbery. The arrest warrant helps us to bring to justice people who have committed heinous crimes in the UK and who should be facing British justice, and people who have committed crimes abroad, whom we want to deport from this country to face justice at home.