My Lords, I support Amendment 9. As I indicated at Second Reading, I support the Bill. There is a great deal to be said for the proposition that there should be reciprocity between countries that respect the rule of law on the administration of criminal justice. However, I strongly support this amendment; I see absolutely no inconsistency between the two propositions.
The reasons why are very simple. We all know that there are countries in the world that do not respect the rule of law. I will not set about trying to give your Lordships a list because the list itself changes. Countries that respected the rule of law no longer do. Weimar Germany did; Hitler’s Germany did not. This is a moveable feast.
My concern is that we are giving the Secretary of State wide powers to add different nations to the list by regulations. At Second Reading I went through the possible reasons, and they are still there: political motivation, getting a good deal on a treaty, the fact
that we need a bit of support on this or that, so we put a country on the list. There is a whole series of reasons why, in years to come, since this Act will be in force for many years, Ministers—not, I hasten to assert, either of these Ministers—will think it appropriate to add to the list countries that this House and the other place together think are inappropriate to be added.
We are doing this by way of regulation, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, pointed out. The consequence is that the Prime Minister of the day or his acolyte—and we are talking about a Prime Minister who would not perhaps respect the rule of law himself, but who knows what could happen—would insist on having a country that we in both Houses would regard as totally inappropriate to be a brother or sister nation on such a list and with whom we would think it quite inappropriate to have any sort of arrangement of this kind simply because it does not respect the rule of law. I have been through that.
What are our processes? They are that such a country could be included in a list of perfectly acceptable countries—the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said the Netherlands and Turkey—but can we just cut down a little further into that? It means that when the House considers the regulation, it will have to decide whether to exclude Turkey—to use the country that the noble Baroness used—because it is really rather important and because we greatly respect the Netherlands, or whether to reject Turkey and the Netherlands. Or, to go the other way, we must have the Netherlands, so we must therefore have Turkey. If one or other of these courses is taken—whichever way round it is—if there is any amendment, the whole thing falls to the ground. We will not want the Netherlands to fall to the ground, nor Denmark, France or Germany. There are many countries that we would want to espouse as colleagues in respect for the rule of law.
What is proposed in this amendment is utterly simple. What is the difficulty in doing it one country by another? It might take a little longer; there might a little more typing, a little more printing—we could even have all the countries, except the ones objected to, come through as a job lot. I gave a little cricketing analogy earlier and I am sorry that I bowled bouncers not googlies at the Minister. One of the most famous things ever said at a cricket match was when, in 1902, Hirst came out to bat against the Australians with 15 runs to get on a difficult wicket in the dark; the story goes that Rhodes met Hirst and exchanged the words, “We’ll get them in singles”. Let us get this done in singles.