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Eighth Standing Committee
on Delegated Legislation
Wednesday 14 July 2004
[Mrs. Irene Adams in the Chair]
Draft Extradition Act (Amendment to Designations) Order 2004
2.30 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Caroline Flint): I beg to move,
That the Committee has considered the draft Extradition Act 2003 (Amendment to Designations) Order 2004.
The Chairman: With this it will be convenient to consider the draft Extradition Act 2003 (Repeals) Order 2004.
Caroline Flint: It is a pleasure to be here before you today Mrs. Adams; this is the first time that I have been on a Committee that you have chaired. I will be brief because neither of these orders contains anything difficult or contentious.
Hon. Members will know that the Extradition Act 2003 received Royal Assent on the 20 November 2003. It underwent fairly intense scrutiny, both in this House and another place, so I hope that we can avoid going over the arguments of principle again today. We are concerned with the further secondary legislation required now that the Extradition Act 1989 is no longer in force, and with amending the Extradition Act 2003 (Designation of Part 1 Territories) Order 2003 and the Extradition Act 2003 (Designation of Part 2 Territories) Order 2003 to include those member states that have now implemented the framework decision on the European arrest warrant.
The draft Extradition Act 2003 (Repeals) Order 2004 is concerned with repealing provisions contained in the Crime (International Co-operation) Act 2003 and the Criminal Justice Act 2003 that refer to the old legislation, the Extradition Act 1989. Those provisions are no longer required as the Extradition Act 1989 was repealed by schedule 4 of the Extradition Act 2003. As the Committee will see, the order cannot be considered to be contentious and the repeals have been agreed with the Office of the Parliamentary Counsel. I therefore hope that we do not need to take up too much time discussing the order.
The draft Extradition Act 2003 (Amendment to Designations) Order 2004 amends the previous designations orders so that those member states that have now implemented the framework decision on the European arrest warrant can be redesignated as category 1 countries. Only then can we act upon European arrest warrants received from those countries. The order contains only 11 names rather than the 17 that might be expected. Those 11 countries are those that have recently confirmed that they have implemented the necessary legislation to allow them to operate the EAW.
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I am pleased to say that Germany, Greece, Estonia and Slovakia have recently confirmed that the necessary domestic legislation is in place. Unfortunately, they were too late to be included in this order, but they will be the subjects of a further order in the near future. The only remaining member states will be the Czech Republic, which hopes to complete its implementation very shortly, and Italy. The latter is not able to confirm when it may be ready to implement the framework decision.
The United Kingdom has been operating the European arrest warrant since 1 January with the other seven member states that also implemented the Council framework decision on the EAW. The new procedure is working well. The first EAW was received from the Republic of Ireland on 16 January and led to the arrest of the person on 22 January. He consented to his extradition and was surrendered to the Irish authorities on 30 January; the entire process was completed in only 14 days. Another encouraging example is that of a person who was arrested in Belgravia for shoplifting and, following police national computer checks, it was discovered that he was wanted in Portugal for murder and robbery. He was extradited to Portugal for those offences only one month later.
The order is about seeing justice working. I was pleased to discuss the issue with a constituent in Birmingham, Hodge Hill recently, who wanted reassurance about our engagement in Europe. I was able to confirm to her that our co-operation with the European Union meant that if someone from another European Union country committed an offence against her or her family, the procedures allow us to chase that person over the channel and work with the authorities in the country to which that person may be returning, to ensure that they can be brought to justice.
The order also amends the time limit regarding Chile to 95 days. This relates to the time limit in which relevant documents have to be received by the judge when a person is arrested under a provisional warrant, and was wrongly listed as 90 days in the original order; I apologise for that mistake. Officials have checked the 19th century treaties and that is why we have revised the time limit to 95 days.
I hope that, with that explanation, the Committee will agree to the two orders.
2.35 pm
Mr. Jonathan Djanogly (Huntingdon) (Con): I agree that the Extradition Act 2003 (Repeals) Order 2004 is uncontentious and is, in effect, consequential to existing policy that has been laid before Parliament, so we shall not oppose it. In relation to the Extradition Act 2003 (Amendment to Designations) Order 2004, if I may start at the back of the order, we see nothing objectionable per se in relation to article 3. On the extension from 90 to 95 days, I was going to ask the Minister if there had been some recent event in our relationship with Chile since the 2003 order that could have predated the more famous extradition order that we had on our hands, but clearly that was a mistake and I thank the Minister for her clarification.
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However, the problems that we identified start with article 2 of the order, which amends the Extradition Act 2003 (Designation of Part 1 territories) Order 2003 and the Extradition Act 2003 (Designation of Part 2 Territories) Order 2004. The territories listed in article 2(3) become category 1 territories and accordingly, part 1 of that Act applies to them. The Extradition Act 2003 provides for new extradition procedures. Since the implementation of the Act at the beginning of the year, each of the UK's extradition partners is in one of two categories. Which category a country is in depends on the extradition procedures that have been decided upon by the UK and its extradition partner.
Category 1 is a simpler system than category 2, and does not require the intervention of Ministers. The reason for that redesignation is that the territories in question have recently implemented the framework decision on the European arrest warrant. The framework decision was set up—or one could say rushed through—after 11 September, and allows an arrest warrant issued in a member state to be speedily executed in another member state. The person arrested can then be transported to the originating member state without the added burden or safeguards of having to comply with the ordinary extradition procedure of investigation and trial for the offence charged. The system requires little evidence about the offence that is supposed to have been committed.
This order will allow the UK to operate the European arrest warrant with those new territories. However, I remain deeply sceptical about the lack of safeguards in a system where arrest for deportation without the usual extradition procedures being adhered to is allowed, especially as the European arrest warrant applies to a variety of offences, not just those relating to terrorism. In particular, there are the vague offences of racism and xenophobia, which could easily be interpreted differently depending on the culture of the country in question. I am concerned that the order allows people to be arrested in this country when their actions would not amount to an arrestable offence. That is because a member state will have to extradite a person accused of an offence, even if that offence is not punishable under its own criminal law. Is not that another attempt by the Government surreptitiously to enlarge the EU at the expense of our country's sovereignty and legal system?
I remain particularly concerned that the order may lead to injustices. It is essential that, to maintain confidence in the system in our country, individual rights must be adequately protected and the risk of miscarriages of justice must be insignificant. When the Extradition Bill was introduced, the Law Society supported the modernisation of extradition laws, but was dubious about the lack of protection afforded to category 1 territories. At the same time, it stated that the extradition procedures proposed for tier 1 and tier 2 states are very different.
The tier 1 procedure implements the European arrest warrant and requires little information about the allegation or evidence available. There is, instead, a reliance on the fairness of each requesting state's criminal justice system in issuing such a request, and
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on dealing with the suspect once they have been transferred. It is important that tier 1 procedures should be available only to states whose criminal justice systems are known to comply with recognised standards. Can the Minister honestly say that we can give such authority to the criminal justice systems of such ex-communist countries as Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Slovenia? Liberty, too, has declared its deep concerns that the category 1 territories would result in injustices. In its response to the consultation on the draft Extradition Bill, it said:
''the Eurowarrant is based upon the presumption that EU countries all have fair systems of justice which should remove the need for any country to scrutinise the fairness of extradition to such a country. This presumption is seriously open to question.''
Caroline Flint: I am going to take the hon. Gentleman up on his slur against countries such as Hungary and Poland, when he referred to them as the ex-communist countries. I seem to recall that Mrs. Thatcher, during her tenure as Prime Minister, made huge strides with the then President of the United States, Ronald Reagan, in working with Russia. It was one of her goals to ensure that countries in the eastern bloc became more part of the European family.
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