I congratulate the shadow Home Secretary on putting before the House a simple and straightforward motion. This difficult and complicated issue involves sovereignty, international crime and the future of the European Union, so it is right that elected Members—even those of us who do not agree with the shadow Home Secretary—can vote on such a straightforward motion.
If the debate was just about the improvements that the Government have made to the European arrest warrant, it might be possible to vote for it, although as my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz) pointed out, many of those improvements do not go as far as they should. If this was simply a matter of the speed of getting through the judicial process, it would be easy to vote for it, for the reasons given by the right hon. Member for Ashford (Damian Green). But it goes much deeper than that. There are justices and injustices involved.
I do not know how to balance the injustices suffered by some people against the undoubted benefits derived from the European arrest warrant. How do we say to Symeou, Dark, Hainsworth, the Kings, Dines and other people who have suffered injustices, “Your injustice under the European arrest warrant is worth going through because it enables us to bring other criminals to court more quickly”? We cannot balance things that way. If we could, I would be interested to know what metric could be used.
The basic issue is not the speed of justice or improvements to the EAW. It is the fact that by entering the European arrest warrant system, we are giving recognition to courts throughout the European Union and passing sovereignty over to the European Court of Justice. To anybody who has read the accession documents just on Croatia—the same comments could be applied to Romania, Bulgaria and a number of other European countries—it is almost beyond dispute that those countries do not have a criminal justice system like ours. Theirs is subject to corruption and political interference, yet we are saying that the European arrest warrant procedure agreed in those countries will be recognised and followed through in this country.
I do not see how we can honour what has been honoured in this country for nearly 800 years—habeas corpus—when we allow British citizens to be taken by foreign courts that are subject to political interference and corruption, and locked up without the evidence being produced.