May I begin by thanking the shadow Home Secretary for bringing forward this debate? In a wonderful spirit of bipartisanship, she has spared the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary their honour. Thanks to the right hon. Lady, the Prime Minister’s promise to have a debate on the European arrest warrant has been met. That shows an admirable, broad-minded, good-spiritedness although we are still some time from Christmas. I will not dwell unduly on the procedures, as those were covered quite thoroughly last week, other than to remind the House of what was said in the other place on Monday. The dissatisfaction is not limited to this Chamber. My noble Friend Lord Boswell, who is not a hard-nosed, hatchet-faced Eurosceptic, said:
“The problem now is a handling issue. The Government—particularly the Home Office—seem to be crippled by fear. Instead of encouraging a frank debate and a clear vote on their decision, they have resorted to undignified and ultimately self-defeating procedural dodges.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 17 November 2014; Vol. 757, c. 333.]
That is an extraordinary statement to be made in their lordships’ House, which is a much less aggressive, more kindly place than this Chamber sometimes.
I want to move on to the substance of the issue. With seven seconds for each of the 35 articles into which we are opting, I will not try to cover every one of them; I feel obliged to stick to the arrest warrant and answer the point that the arrest warrant is not essential to extradition. It is perfectly possible to have extradition arrangements either with the European Union or with individual nation states, as we do with the United States of America. That is then outside the ambit of the European Court of Justice. It is the Court of Justice of the European Union that is at the heart of the matter. Constitutionally,
it is the real problem, because all our safeguards are speculative—the Home Secretary admits that herself. It has not yet been judged by the Court of Justice as to whether those safeguards will be upheld, and there is no appetite within Europe for reforming the basis of the arrest warrant. I am glad to see the Home Secretary returning to her place.
In evidence given to the European Scrutiny Committee, it was made clear that efforts to rewrite the details of the arrest warrant to put in some of the protections did not meet with any support. When a representative of the Commission gave evidence to the Lords’ Extradition Law Committee, she said that there was no willingness to transform the arrest warrant to bring in those safeguards. The European Court of Justice, an ambitious court that has historically extended its powers to cover an increasing number of areas, will be in charge of how extradition from this country takes place from 1 December. That is very dangerous, because it risks some of those things that we in this country hold most dear; it risks people being extradited to countries that do not have habeas corpus.