The hon. Member for Hammersmith (Mr Slaughter) quoted his speech in 2011, but it is his speech today that ought to go down in legend and song. Indeed, a sentence from it should be engraved in the deepest, finest granite and remembered by all of us who are interested in this debate, for he got absolutely to the heart of the subject when he said that the problem is trying to impose a system of Roman law on a common law system. That is at the heart of difficulty of imposing anything from the justice area on the United Kingdom. I rejoice at his saying it, because I hope that it shows a change from his attitude in 2011, when he was quite keen on opting into things. I did not agree with the vision of his previous speech, but this one was of the greatest quality, nobility and thoughtfulness, and I hope that it receives the praise it deserves.
While in this mood of good will, I want to praise the wisdom of my right hon. Friend the Lord Chancellor. In opting out of the three important directives—and, indeed, from the directive on right of access to a lawyer—he has avoided falling into the European trap. A number of directives are coming through in the justice and home affairs area, particularly on the European arrest warrant, which we have opted into, and the trap is very serious. Once we have opted into one thing, the next step is to say that because it is possible for a British citizen to be arrested by a foreign court and taken out of this country to be tried in a foreign place, losing the rights that would normally belong to a British subject, we need to
impose other safeguards, but to impose such safeguards we need common rules to ensure that treatment is the same and that we have a pan-European view on the presumption of innocence.
Such a view is needed because a British subject can be taken out of this country and taken abroad without any questioning in this country of whether their trial will be fair and proper. As that can be done under the European arrest warrant, we are led to say that it is only right and proper to have safeguards on the presumption of innocence. Exactly the same applies to the directive on procedural safeguards for children and, tying in with it, the right of access to a lawyer.
Once there is common acceptance of other nations’ legal systems, we begin to say that they will work only if we have common safeguards, and once we begin to accept common safeguards we are effectively implementing a single criminal law across the whole of Europe. Once that has been done, legal aid must of course be unified across the European Union, because the person arrested needs to be able to afford the defence to which they are entitled, in accordance with laws laid down by the centre.
This is not a matter of co-operating with European partners or of saying that there is a proper degree of justice in some European countries to which we are willing to extradite our citizens; it is a question of saying that we believe that ours is the only way to ensure proper justice in relation to some relatively undeveloped judicial systems. I am thinking of some countries that have joined the European Union more recently, particularly Croatia. In our debates about its application for membership of the European Union, we discussed the difficulties in its judiciary and police that were not solved before it joined. Despite the European Union’s requirement that they should be resolved, it was allowed to leave them to be improved after it joined. The same applies to Romania and Bulgaria. Once it has been accepted that such countries have the right to arrest British subjects, it inevitably follows that common standards of protection must be applied, with an overall court of appeal that can review it. Those are the stepping stones towards a single European criminal justice system.
I praise the Lord Chancellor because he is now, I hope, taking the stepping stones in the other direction. We have had the block opt-out. We have restored to the United Kingdom rights over justice and home affairs. Unfortunately, we have not settled on which items we wish to opt back into. When that list comes forward, it is crucial that the things that we opt back into are not used as an excuse for bringing back the measures before us. I am thinking in particular of the European arrest warrant. As soon as that is in, the presumption of innocence must be a pan-European right, because nobody in this House would like a British subject to be deported to a foreign country and not have the presumption of innocence in his favour. The same is true of the other two measures that we are countering.
I hope that in the battles that go on within Whitehall the Lord High Chancellor will know that he has the support not just of Conservative Members but of the bulk of the country in standing up for our common law system against, as the hon. Member for Hammersmith reminded us, a Roman law system that is not suitable for this nation.
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