Police and Justice Bill

I support my noble friend’s amendments. I have followed the issue of UK/US extradition policy with some interest since the difficulties of the current treaty and the arrangements surrounding it were first discussed during the Committee stage of what is now the Extradition Act 2003. Since then, the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, tabled an Unstarred Question for debate on this subject on 6 December 2004, and I tabled a further Unstarred Question that was debated on 30 June 2005. My concerns about the extradition arrangements and the reasons why I support my noble friend’s amendments can be summarised under the three headings of fundamental imbalance, change of purpose and lack of reciprocity. As a subset of that, I, too, am concerned at how the Government sneaked the treaty through without proper parliamentary scrutiny. That did not reflect well on them at all. Perhaps I may first consider the second heading, change of purpose, because it has been focused on less by other noble Lords. The treaty was signed inthe aftermath of the terrible events in New York on 11 September 2001, and the Government made it clear at the time that its main use would be to speed up and improve the process by which suspected terrorists would be extradited. In another place, the Government gave assurances that white-collarcrimes would not be the main focus of the treaty. On 15 December 2003, in a debate in the other place, Caroline Flint, speaking for the Government, responded to a Question by Mr Menzies Campbell, MP. She stated: "““We do not have such a range of offences involving financial crime. The cases mentioned by the Financial Times””—" there had been an article in that paper on that day— "““—such as price fixing—would not apply””.—[Official Report, Commons, 15/12/03; col. 26.]" Yet, of the 46 extradition requests made by the US between 1 January 2004 and 28 April 2006, 19 related to financial crime and only three to terrorism. Either we have been misled by the Government about the real purpose of the treaty, or the Government have been misled by their US counterparts. My second area of concern is the fundamental imbalance in the treaty. My noble friend Lord Kingsland, and the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, have already explained this and I shall not weary the Committee by repeating much of what they have said, except to say that it is clear that the US Department of Justice is hell-bent on using this advantage as widely as possible. At a conference in Las Vegas on3 and 4 March 2005, the deputy assistant Attorney General of the Department of Justice’s anti-trust division, Mr Scott Hammond, bragged that the US no longer had to make a prima facie case in support of extradition requests or even provide witness affidavits. He went on to say that hearsay affidavits by the prosecutor were enough and that appeal rights had been curtailed. I shall not detain the Committee by quoting from the speeches in Las Vegas, but I can summarise them by saying that they are testosterone-fuelled. My third problem is with the lack of reciprocity, given the failure of the US to ratify. It is a scandal that, in the three years since the treaty was signed and brought into force in the UK, the US has failed, despite continued requests to ratify its half—or, perhaps, to be fair, I should say, its quarter—of the agreement. In her reply to the debate that I initiated on 30 June 2005, the noble Baroness stated: "““Nevertheless, the Government are not being complacent…I hope your Lordships will be pleased to learn that my right honourable friend the Home Secretary raised this very matter with the new US Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, in the margins of the G8 meeting in Sheffield on 16 June. I hope noble Lords will be reassured to know that the Attorney-General had the misfortune to be sitting with me on a bus, from which he could not escape for some considerable time. So I too had the ""privilege and pleasure of explaining to him in quite graphic detail, why this matter was causing your Lordships acute anxiety””.—[Official Report, 30.6/05; col. 410.]" No doubt, as my noble and learned friend Lord Mayhew has pointed out, the noble Baroness was as charming to Mr Gonzales as she always is to this House. Charming she may have been, but persuasive she most certainly was not. It is now 13 months since Sheffield and matters have not moved forward one jot. The removal of the US from Part 2 of the Extradition Act 2003 would return requests to the same basis as that on which they were conducted under the 1972 treaty, and this will create the reciprocity that I seek. It will also perhaps provide some backbone to the Government’s negotiations with the US, which now appears to be conspicuous by its absence. Finally, I hope that when the noble Baroness comes to reply, she will not fall back on the argument she floated in the Financial Times earlier this week: that approving this amendment would be ““an insult”” to the US judicial system. Nothing could be further from the truth; it is the extradition treaty that is the insult. Only if the Government were today to state that they had given the six-month notice necessary for the revocation of the treaty under Article 24 would this amendment in any way become superfluous.