Coroners and Justice Bill

I am grateful for that assurance. The second matter that I took from his reply is that unless the nature of the conviction in a European Union country is clearly explained to a judge and shown to be apposite, the judge can ignore that previous conviction. I come back to the illustration that I gave earlier from my own experience of a person convicted in Belgium:—of what he was convicted and whether he had successfully appealed was absolutely unclear. Despite the involvement of Belgian lawyers and requests from the Supreme Court in Belgium, no one was able to clarify precisely what had happened, what he had been convicted of or what his sentence was. In those circumstances, I take it that the Minister would agree that the judge is fully entitled to say, "Well, it’s for the prosecution to show that this is a proper conviction", and if they cannot do that, the judge can ignore it.