European Union (Amendment) Bill

The hon. Gentleman must take his medicine; he certainly deserves it. I am not going to exempt the Minister from this, either. This is what he has agreed to:"““The European Council shall define the strategic guidelines for legislative and Operational planning within the area of freedom, security and justice.””" It cannot be right for us to be locking ourselves into this kind of requirement. In law, ““shall”” means ““must””, and that relates to the law as applied by the European Court. There is no doubt whatever that we should reject this. The 1999 temporary European Council provided a programme setting out policy guidelines and objectives with a timetable for their achievement. Under the Lisbon treaty, the European Council is obliged to define guidelines for legislative operational action. That is a step up into the arena that we should reject. Article 61B is another provision whereby ““National Parliaments”” are to be placed under a legal obligation to make sure that European Union police and justice comply with national authority. It provides yet another example of an obligation being imposed on national Parliaments. There is no need to go further into this right now, because we will deal with it later, but this obligation, which the European Scrutiny Committee has censured in its report by requiring that there should be no ambiguity about it, offends article 9 of the Bill of Rights. As I say, I am not going into that now, because we will hopefully have a proper debate later.