The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, has looked at the directive. I have gone back to the convention of the Council of Europe, which comes before the directive but is couched in very similar terms. I am somewhat surprised that the noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, did not pursue her amendments, because they seem to me to be closer to what is needed. They wanted to put in the phraseology that is in the convention and the directive: “recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of persons” and so on. Clause 2 is fine so far as it goes, but it does not go quite far enough.
We seem to have an extraordinary English desire for the word “traffic” to mean movement. However, that is not how it is seen across Europe. What worries me about that is that this is going to be a flagship Bill of great importance which may well be followed by countries round Europe and far beyond. However, we may not fall in line with all the conventions from the Palermo Protocol through to the Council of Europe convention and the directive of the European Union and we may want to use the Bill internationally—I hope we may—to persuade other countries to send their offenders to us, or to ask them to send over our offenders.
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The offences with which we are concerned—for example, offences covered by the European arrest warrant—may involve movement. A group of men may be trafficking in the English sense—that is, trafficking men, women and children right round the world to England, but doing so in order to sell them on. Their job is to get them here; once they are here, other groups take them over. I hope that Clause 1 deals with that situation but I am not entirely sure. However, if you put into Clause 2 the Council of Europe definition of trafficking, you will be absolutely safe on that.
The point that is worrying me is that we have produced a much more defined and limited version of this. Article 4 of the convention—oddly, it is Article 4 of both the convention and the directive—explains in paragraphs (b), (c), (d) and (e) what paragraph (a) actually means. Interestingly, the word “exploitation” appears in an explanation of trafficking. If I may respectfully say so, that is where the Government have got this right—because one wants to include trafficking for the purposes of exploitation.
Taking account of the amendments of the noble Baroness, Lady Goudie, which were not moved, my only issue on this is that we ought to include in Clause 2(1) the extended wording of recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt. I appreciate that, if we do that, the Bill team may say that we are covering part of Clause 1. That may be a problem. However, I do not think that the fact that it is repeating something in different words is the end of the world—because, if you are to use the word “trafficking”, you may have to explain to a jury that you do not have to move somebody from A to B in order to traffic them. If you put in
the offences of Clause 1 as the alternative offences, I expect you would be covered anyway. However, I am unhappy that we are limiting the word “trafficking”, given its important European meaning, and that we are one step behind the Europeans in a Bill which we hope will be taken up, particularly by eastern European countries.