Lisbon Treaty (No.1)

It is always a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve), who has won many awards for his parliamentary skill and ability. Sadly however, he concentrated in his speech today not on the substance of the justice and home affairs agenda, but on what I was going to call his Euroscepticism although I should apologise for calling him that because we now know that he is half French—I should, perhaps, now say that he has been half a Eurosceptic in his arguments. In contrast, the Home Secretary made an excellent speech in which she rightly set out the Government's commitment to further co-operation with EU partners on the justice and home affairs agenda. I commend her on what she has done, and I commend to the House the Home Affairs Committee report entitled, ““Justice and Home Affairs Issues at European Union Level””, which was published on 11 October last year and which is tagged to the motion before the House. I intend to speak about the report and its influence on the Government's decision to accept the treaty and to put its main provisions before the House. The report was written before my time as the Committee's Chairman, but I know that its members, some of whom were present during the earlier part of the debate, were keen to ensure that although it is called the Home Affairs Committee, it carefully examined the European dimension. The Committee examined the following issues: justice, of course; practical co-operation between member states; mutual recognition, including the development of minimum standards across the whole of the EU; the harmonisation of the criminal justice systems; the processes of decision making and whether problems are driven by third pillar procedures; the significance of a trend towards internal agreements between informal groups of member states outside the EU framework; and the current developments in common border controls and visa arrangements. International crime, people trafficking, migration issues and other policing issues are, as the Home Secretary and others have told the House, no longer issues just for internal domestic consumption, and it would be very foolish to treat them as such. The Home Affairs Committee has been very clear in its recognition that we cannot keep our country safe and fight organised crime and terrorism without working closely with our neighbours. It said that in some cases not enough had been done to ensure a better level of co-operation. The treaty of Lisbon, and its commitment to those principles that I have outlined, is therefore extremely welcome.