Extradition (Provisional Arrest) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2020-02-04
Topic: Law and Crime
William Fletcher-Vane (Non-Affiliated, Unknown): My Lords, as a number of noble Lords have commented, it was my privilege and pleasure five years ago to chair the House of Lords committee on the workings of the Extradition Act 2003. I found it a challenging assignment; while once upon a time, long ago, I knew a bit of law, I had forgotten most of that and this involved areas I had never known about in the first place. However, we reached the conclusion—shared, I believe, not only by members of the committee but the House—that our extradition arrangements were, essentially, systemically acceptable, albeit involving a series of problems and shortcomings and, in some respects, less than perfect I remember becoming very clear on the importance of understanding that extradition is based on the principle of comity; in other words, it is based on a recognition of other people’s criminal laws, which may be a bit different from your own. At the same time, this recognition has to be locked together with recognising the importance of human rights; the one thing you cannot do is triangulate one off against the other. That is why in my view, when thinking about the extradition system generally, it is important to be clear about what bars exist under our system regarding people who otherwise would be extradited, and the protections that that confers Against that background, the essential case for the Bill has been that we should change the basis on which a person subject to extradition proceedings abroad could be arrested when identified. The basic principle seems to me, as for almost all Members of the House, to be a sound one, and to bring Part 2 of the legislation in line with the reality of the processes in Part 1 is a good step. However, as a number of your Lordships have said, this particular Bill really falls into two parts: there are the specific provisions about provisional arrest that are contained within the Title of the Bill, and then there is the dog that does not bark, or perhaps the dog that just whines in the corner: paragraph 29 at the end of the Schedule, which in my view is a completely separate issue from the specific one In his remarks at the beginning of the proceedings, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, rightly focused on the potential mischief that these provisions, as drafted, could bring about. After all, we know that we are in a world where any piece of legislation that the word "European" comes into is as toxic to the Government as the coronavirus. The reality, which has been accepted by almost all the speakers this afternoon, is that the workings of the system of the European arrest warrant are to everyone’s advantage, yet we are living at a time when we are almost certainly going to see changes introduced to that. Exactly what they will be, no one knows—anything from a slightly tweaked version of the existing form of arrangements through to, I suspect, adding some or all the European countries to Part 2 of the Bill. Who knows? This issue is very important for this country, and I do not think that kind of thing should be determined by secondary legislation There is an important fundamental principle here, quite separate from the specific business about provisional arrest, that this House ought to take extremely seriously. To encapsulate it in a few words, it seems strange that we need an Act of Parliament to bring about changes regarding provisional arrest while by secondary legislation we can turn the system of extradition law that we have in this country on its head.