I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following: Government new clause 12—Undertaking in relation to person serving sentence.

Government new clause 13—Extradition following deferral for competing claim.

Government new clause 14—Person charged with offence in United Kingdom.

Government new clause 15—Person serving sentence in United Kingdom.

Government new clause 17—Appeal against grant of bail.

Government new clause 18—Remand to local authority accommodation. Amendment No. 20, in clause 2, page 1, line 17, at end insert—

'(c) The statement referred to in subsections (3) and (5) shall conform with the provisions of the model warrant annexed to the framework decision.'.

Amendment No. 18, in page 2, line 6, at end insert—

'(c) the terms "accused" in paragraph (a) above, and "for the purpose of being prosecuted for the offence" in paragraph (b) above, are understood to mean:

(i) that sufficient evidence has already been gathered to bring a prosecution and to commit to trial the person in respect of whom the warrant is issued; and

(ii) the extradition sought by the requesting state must be only for the purpose of putting the person on trial, and not: for the purpose of interrogation or evidence gathering; and

(iii) that if, after the extradition has been granted, it emerges that the requesting country. in the opinion of the judge granting the extradition, has not fulfilled these conditions, the person shall be returned to the United Kingdom, upon an order from the appropriate judge.'.

Government amendments Nos. 35 to 37, 43 and 44.

Amendment No. 4, in page 18, line 30, leave out clause 39.

Government amendment No. 50.

Amendment No. 92, in clause 65, page 33, line 44, at end insert—

', as provided for in section 2(7)'.

Government amendments Nos. 53 to 56, 59, 32, 62, 33, 63 and 65.

Amendment No. 93, in clause 83, page 42, leave out lines 9 to 11.

Government amendment No. 66.

Amendment No. 94, in clause 85, page 43, leave out lines 16 to 18.

Government amendments Nos. 14, 67 to 73, 6, 76, 77, 11 to 13, 83, 84 and 87.

This is a large group of new clauses and amendments. I shall begin with new clauses 10, 17 and 18 and amendments Nos. 32, 33, 83, 84 and 87, which are concerned with bail provisions in extradition proceedings, especially the right of the requesting state to appeal against bail granted to a fugitive.

New clause 18 covers the position of juveniles who are subject to an extradition request. New clause 10 and amendments Nos. 32, 33 and 84 take account of the slightly different bail rules that apply in Scotland.

During extradition proceedings, the fugitive can either be held on remand or granted bail, at the discretion of the judge. For the first time, we are creating a presumption in favour of bail in ex tradition cases. The fugitive will have the right of appeal against a decision to remand him. However, as currently drafted, the Bill does not provide a similar right to the requesting state to appeal against a decision to grant bail, even though the prosecution has that right in normal domestic cases. We believe that it would be desirable to keep extradition bail law as closely as possible in line with normal bail provisions, so we want to rectify that omission, which is what this set of amendments will do.

I shall try to be brief. This is a very extensive group of amendments, and I do not want to waste the House's time on the relatively non-controversial or technical amendments, so I shall try to move as quickly as I can through my speaking notes to allow the maximum time to consider those issues of substance that remain to be discussed.

On Government amendments Nos. 32 and 33, the police in Scotland, unlike in England and Wales, have no power to grant bail. However, the Lord Advocate has the power to grant bail to any person charged with any crime or offence. Proposed new section 24A(1)(b) of the Criminal Procedure (Scotland) Act 1995 will make it clear that the Lord Advocate should mirror the provisions in relation to a person subject to extradition proceedings that apply in England and Wales. Government amendment No. 84 is purely a drafting change that makes no difference of substance.

Government new clauses 12 and 13 are purely technical. The Bill contains provisions that will allow us to seek undertakings when we send a serving prisoner abroad to stand trial. The Bill also covers situations where extradition is halted while a competing claim is considered, but a decision is taken to proceed with the original request. Both those provisions need to be slightly modified in cases where the fugitive consents to extradition, and those new clauses will achieve that.

Government new clauses 14 and 15 deal with the situation where a person who is subject to an extradition request in the United Kingdom is charged with an offence in the UK or is serving a sentence of detention here. As currently drafted, part 1 will require a judge to adjourn the extradition if at any time he is informed that the fugitive has been charged with a domestic UK offence. Similarly, if a person is serving a sentence of detention in the UK, the judge has the power to adjourn until such time as the sentence has been served.

However, under part 2, in the same circumstances and even though the judge is fully aware of the charge or the sentence, he must allow the case to run its full course and then refer it to the Secretary of State. Under part 2, the power to adjourn proceedings rests with the Secretary of State and can be exercised only when the case has reached him. Government new clauses 14 and 15 are necessary to bring part 2 into line with part 1, to ensure that we have a standard approach, so that such part 2 extradition cases can be adjourned, thus not wasting the court's time or the taxpayer's money.

With reference to Government new clause 14(4) and the exercise of judicial power, is there an entitlement to appeal?

There is entitlement to appeal against all decisions taken under part 1 and part 2. However, in part 1 countries—our European Union partners under the European arrest warrant procedures—a strict time limit is applied to how long can be taken to deal with those appeals. We are attempting to introduce a streamlined extradition system—particularly streamlined in relation to our EU partners—and to prevent to the maximum possible degree the lengthy proceedings that take place under our current, totally unacceptable extradition arrangements. That is the purpose of new clauses 14 and 15: to bring part 2 into line with part 1, so that the cases can be adjourned, and so that there is not the unnecessary requirement to continue to the end knowing that the proceedings will have to be stopped in the final analysis.

Having looked at the new clauses and some of the associated amendments in this group, I shall now deal with amendments Nos. 20 and 18, tabled by Conservative Members, which refer to clause 2. I do not believe that there is much difference between the Government's position and that of the Opposition. That was reflected in the constructive discussion that we had on these issues in Committee. I said that I would go away and consider some of the points raised in Committee, and having done so, I am pleased to have the opportunity to set out the conclusions that we have reached.

With regard to accusation cases, both sides of the House are agreed that extradition should only be possible for the purpose of putting a person on trial. It should not be possible for the purpose of interrogation or for the purposes of evidence gathering. Similarly, in conviction cases, the purpose of extradition should be that a person serves the sentence that has been imposed, or, if he has escaped before the sentencing process, that he can be sentenced. If Opposition Members examine the Bill, they will see that it already achieves that. A part 1 warrant is an arrest warrant that contains two key elements: the statement and the information. The contents of the statement and the information vary slightly depending on whether it is an accusation or conviction case. The information includes such details as the particulars of the person's identity or any other warrant, the circumstances of the offence, the particulars of the sentence that would be available to the court, or, in a conviction case, the sentence that has already been imposed.

Of more importance for present purposes, however, is what is contained in the statement. If hon. Members look at clause 2(3), they will see that what is required, first, with conviction cases, is that not only must a person be accused of an offence in a requesting state, but the warrant must have been issued with a view to his arrest and extradition to the category 1 territory for the purpose of being prosecuted for the offence. That is unambiguous language: it is not about interrogation, and it does not allow extradition for the purpose of evidence gathering or fishing expeditions; it is about putting a person on trial. No other meaning can be attached to those words.

I know that that position is supported by the hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples), who said in Committee:

"I would be happy to use the words in the framework document, which are 'for the purpose of conducting a criminal prosecution'."—[Official Report, Standing Committee D, 9 January 2003; c. 53.]

I would suggest that the words,

"for the purpose of being prosecuted for the offence"

are significantly close to

"for the purpose of conducting a criminal prosecution".

The amendment would make absolutely no difference.

Similarly, in conviction cases, the Bill provides that the statement must say that the

"warrant is issued with a view to his arrest and extradition to the category 1 territory for the purpose of being sentenced for the offence or of serving a sentence of imprisonment or another form of detention imposed in respect of the offence."

Again, the position is unambiguous: if the statement does not contain the relevant information, the UK designated authority will be unable to certify it, and no further action could be taken on the extradition request.

Having set out why I believe that the Bill in its present form achieves what we want, I shall say a few words about the Opposition amendments.

Having checked clause 2(3), I can see that it is in fairly unambiguous language. I wonder whether my hon. Friend could clarify one matter. In some systems, for example in Spain and Italy, where there are investigating magistrates, the process between arrest, investigation and standing trial is not as clear as in our system. How would the provision apply in those circumstances?

We already extradite people, and have done so for a long tame, to those jurisdictions. We do so for the purposes of their being put on trial. and not for the purposes of investigation taking place. A clear statement will be required in the warrant, the exact wording of which I have just read out, and the judicial authority that makes that request will have had to sign up to that statement. The National Criminal Intelligence Service, which will be the designated authority that will look at those incoming requests, will examine that statement, and if it is not in compliance with that requirement, it will say so, and will effectively stop the extradition proceedings before they even commence. We have a record in this area: although there are many other problems in relation to extradition, I have yet to hear of a situation in which the arrangements for requests from states that are our regular extradition partners have caused problems in the past, and I do not expect the system to change or problems to be caused in the future.

Having said what the Bill clearly requires and prevents, let me turn to amendment No. 20, which requires that any warrant should conform to the model warrant attached to the framework decision. The simple point to make is that that will happen already. The requirements of the Bill mean that all the information included in the model warrant has to be supplied if extradition is to take place.

I consider amendment No. 18 unnecessary, but we should not let it pass without comment. It states that if a court abroad has not acted in accordance with the wishes of a British judge, a fugitive held abroad shall be released and returned to Britain on the order of a British judge. I do not know whether Conservative Members can imagine that operating in reverse, and how we would we feel about a German or French judge being able to order the release of somebody who was in front of a court in the UK. I find it astonishing: it harks back to empire days when we sent a gunboat round to ensure that people did things in the British way. I am not sure that it is in any way workable, and it is certainly not needed. In the light of that explanation of how the Bill will work with its current wording, I ask Conservative Members not to press the amendments to a Division.

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I trust that all hon. Members will welcome Government amendments Nos. 35 to 37. They should be appreciated by Conservative and Liberal Democrat Members because they respond to a point raised by representatives of both parties in Committee. My hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) and other members of the Select Committee on Home Affairs should also welcome them because they raised the same concern. The amendments will make a European arrest warrant acceptable only if it is issued by a judicial authority in a requesting state. If the warrant came from any other source, the UK designated authority would be unable to certify it and no further action could be taken on it. The stipulation that the warrant must be issued by a judicial authority is already in the framework document, so the amendments will make little difference in practice. Nevertheless, we thought it right to respond to the wishes of those who raised the issue and to make the guarantee explicit in the Bill.

Government amendment No. 37 will create a power to disapply the judicial requirement in respect of requests from certain countries that were issued before January 2004, which is when the European arrest warrant regime is due to come into effect. It is a transitional measure to enable the UK to deal with requests that are already on the Schengen information system when the UK becomes a party to the system in 2004. Pre-existing requests require a judicial authority to issue a domestic arrest warrant and a judge's permission would normally be required before requests were placed on the Schengen information system. However, some countries might put information on the system at the instigation of a police officer. In such circumstances, a person for whom extradition is sought may try to delay proceedings by claiming that the request did not come from a judicial authority. Given that a judicial authority must have backed the warrant in the first place, such arguments may well not succeed but we want to pre-empt attempts to delay and frustrate the extradition process. The problem will not arise after countries begin to operate a system of European arrest warrants, so we require only a limited short-term measure.

Government amendments Nos. 43 and 63 respond to a concern raised in Committee. A person's identity is an important aspect of the extradition process and no hon. Member would want the Bill to allow the extradition of a person other than a person for whom extradition was sought. The Bill provides that, at the initial hearing that is held almost immediately after a person is arrested, the judge must decide whether the person before him is the person for whom the extradition request has been made. That process is not to determine whether extradition should occur and still less about determining whether a person is guilty of the crime for which his extradition is sought, but to ensure that the right person has been caught.

The question of identity might be disputed in several cases. The Bill's current drafting requires the judge at the initial hearing to be satisfied that the person in court is the person for whom the warrant was issued. If the judge is not satisfied of that, the person must be discharged. It was suggested in Committee that the Bill should specify the standard of proof that would be required to determine that. That is a sensible suggestion and the amendments introduce the civil test of the balance of probabilities.

There are several reasons why we opted for the civil test rather than the criminal test. Extradition is not a prosecution and thus there is no need to apply the criminal test slavishly. However, it is an important fact that people who are subject to extradition requests are usually serious criminals, including terrorists, and such people are often adept at making their identity ambiguous or having multiple identities. If we had decided to use the criminal standard of proof beyond all reasonable doubt, we might be unable to be certain of people's identity, which would allow them to walk free irrespective of the seriousness of the crime of which they were accused. The civil test, which is regularly used in, and understood by, British courts, is an appropriate way to ensure that a judge may reach a reasonable decision about a person's identity.

Government amendments Nos. 44, 59 and 62 relate to an issue that was discussed at length in Committee. They will require the judge at the initial hearing to make the requested person aware of the contents of the warrant for arrest and extradition. The fugitive will already be aware of the contents of the warrant in the vast majority of cases because the police will generally show such people the contents of the warrant at the time of arrest or shortly after. In addition, the amendments will allow a fugitive or his legal representative to demand to see the warrant at any time. The new provisions make little difference in practice, but we hope that they represent a useful additional safeguard and that Opposition Members will welcome them.

Amendment No. 4 has been tabled by the Conservative party, and we have tried long and hard to work out its rationale. Clause 39 provides that no person who has claimed asylum shall be extradited until a decision has been reached on that claim. The Government are all too aware that the asylum system has been subject to abuse and has been used to delay and frustrate the extradition process. That is why we included provisions to address that difficult situation and spurious asylum claims and appeals. If it is considered that an asylum claim is clearly unfounded, it can be certified as such by the Secretary of State when he refuses the claim. That certificate will mean that a person will be able to appeal against the asylum refusal only after extradition. The amendment would delete the entire clause and undo our attempt to provide a solution to such potential abuse.

I hope that the Opposition will welcome Government amendments Nos. 50 and 67 to 69. The right to representation at a trial and the right to legal aid remain the cornerstones of our judicial system. We tabled the amendments to ensure that the right to legal aid that is enshrined in the Access to Justice Act 1999 applies to the issue of consenting to extradition. They provide that, before a judge accepts a fugitive's consent to extradition, he must check that that person had the opportunity to receive independent legal advice. In some cases, the fugitive would have declined to apply for legal aid after he had been advised that he was entitled to it. The underlying principle is that nobody should consent to extradition unless the opportunity for legal advice has been made available to them.

Although amendment No. 92 is well intentioned, it is not needed and does not add anything to the safeguards in the Bill. Under clause 2, the UK's designated authority—which will be the National Criminal Intelligence Service or the Crown Office in Scotland—can certify an incoming European arrest warrant only if it believes that the request has come from an appropriate judicial authority. Clauses 63 to 65 deal with what constitutes an extradition offence in order for the dual criminality requirement not to apply. I cannot therefore see what purpose would be served by trying to link clauses 2 and 65, as the amendment would. The definition is already identical, so the point is fully covered.

Government amendments Nos. 53 to 56 and 70 to 73 are purely drafting amendments. Unless somebody insists that I go into them, I shall not detain the House.

I turn to amendments Nos. 93 and 94 and Government amendments Nos. 65 and 66, which were tabled in response to concerns that have been raised. I hope that the House agrees that the Government amendments are a constructive answer. Requests from part 2 countries will often need to be accompanied by prima facie evidence. The amendments are concerned with the provisions that allow for documentary or summary evidence to be admitted in court. At present, evidence in those forms is not generally admissible. That might mean that we have to require, for example, a foreign witness to give evidence in person rather than accepting a police officer's account of what the witness had told him. That is particularly wasteful and cumbersome in cases where evidence is uncontested. Accordingly, the Bill provides for hearsay evidence to be admitted.

There were concerns raised in Committee surrounding a case where the judge did not have the discretion to refuse to accept documentary or summary evidence if he had reason to believe that the evidence was faulty or flawed. We have listened to those arguments and given the district judge much greater discretion not to accept such evidence if he so chooses. I should add the reassurance that the Bill does not oblige the person whose extradition is sought to give evidence in summary; nor will it prevent the person from challenging any evidence that is given in summary or on behalf of the requesting state. I know that that was a particular concern of my hon. Friend the Member for Doncaster, North (Mr. Hughes). I hope that it is clear that those circumstances do not apply. There is no way that the defendant in such cases will be prevented from giving evidence in person.

Government amendments Nos. 14 and 6 clarify the role of Scottish Ministers to order the extradition or discharge of a person arrested under part 2. Amendment No. 6 makes it clear that Scottish Ministers will be able to make a deferral order only when they are considering competing requests.

The House may know that the Bill deals with a situation where two or more competing requests are received in respect of the same person. It provides that proceedings are deferred until a decision is taken on which should be given priority. It also provides for matters to be picked up again once that decision has been taken. Government amendments Nos. 76, 77 and 11 rectify an omission by specifying the appropriate judge in the deferred case.

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Government amendments Nos. 12 and 13 are purely

technical adaptations that are required for the Scottish jurisdiction. Amendment No. 12 makes it clear that all the rules of court to be made under this legislation will be made by act of adjournal in Scotland. Amendment No. 13 reflects the different terminology used in Scotland, where appeals are "abandoned" rather than "discontinued".

I am sorry that this has taken so long, but the group of amendments is extensive. I commend the Government amendments to the House and ask the Opposition to consider withdrawing amendments Nos. 20, 18, 4, 92, 93 and 94.

As the Minister has said, this is a detailed group of amendments. We on the Front Benches hope that our colleagues will bear with us as we wrestle with the complexities and technicalities of extradition law and procedure.

I should stress at the outset that we welcome some of the provisions in the Bill. They are a welcome improvement and will help our police to extradite back to the United Kingdom people who are wanted here for serious offences. We welcome the fact that not only in this group of amendments but in subsequent ones, the Government have made several concessions in response to points that we made in Committee. However, they have not addressed all our concerns—not least the very big issue, as the Minister is well aware, of the European arrest warrant and the consequences of it. The Government have signed up to offences in the framework decision list, many of which are vague and some of which are not offences in UK law. There is a danger that British subjects will be shipped abroad without a British court being able to analyse or challenge the basis of a warrant issued by a foreign court.

We repeatedly raised in Committee the example of the British plane spotters in the Kalamata court in Greece. That was a dire warning, which we discussed extensively. Since proceedings in Committee were concluded, we have had a further dire warning of the risk to UK citizens as a result of paperwork sent from one country to another demanding someone's arrest. The British pensioner Derek Bond was held for weeks in South Africa because the American authorities mistakenly thought that he was a wanted man. We shall deal later with the detail of why we feel that the draconian powers in part 1 should apply only to terrorist offences, as my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) said on Second Reading.

We welcome Government new clauses 10, 17 and 18 and Government amendments Nos. 32, 33. 83, 84 and 87. They are a response by the Government to concerns we raised in Committee. A foreign requesting country will now have the right to appeal against the granting of bail. I raised in Committee and on other occasions the fact that bail is too readily available in a wide variety of criminal proceedings in such courts. In UK courts, the granting of bail certainly ought to be reviewable in extradition cases, so we welcome what the Government have done.

Government new clause 18 deals with juveniles going to local authority secure accommodation if they are not granted bail. Related amendments, as the Minister said, deal with the slightly different bail arrangements in Scotland. We accept entirely that the Government are once again responding to concerns that we and others have raised. However, in passing, will the Minister note that we still have great concerns about the limited quantity and poor quality of local authority secure accommodation? There may be relatively few cases in which that will be needed in an extradition context, but we will no doubt return to the issue in other legislation and other debates.

Government new clauses 12 and 13 are technical, as the Minister said, and we are happy to accept what the Government are suggesting. Government new clauses 14 and 15 address a mismatch between part 2 and part 1. It is good that the Government now accept that part 2 proceedings should be brought into line with part 1 on the issue of adjournment if a judge is informed that the fugitive has been charged with a UK offence or is a serving UK prisoner. We appreciate the need for consistency, but given the Secretary of State's recent mauling on many issues at the hands of British judges, it is perhaps a little surprising that he is abandoning his decision-making power and giving it back to the judges.

Our amendments Nos. 20 and 18 go together to some extent. We intend to ask the House to divide on amendment No. 20, although I am advised by the expert Clerks that the vote will not take place at the end of the debate on this group of amendments, but later in our proceedings. We have made it clear that we are not comfortable with the concept of the European arrest warrant. We said in Committee that legislation introduced in the House should be honest and complete, and that all UK citizens should be able to see clearly what they are being made subject to by the Government. As a result, the proposed warrant ought to be included in the Bill—that is what our amendment No. 20 seeks to do, and we see no good reason why the wording of the warrant should not be included in the legislation. That must help honesty, clarity and—a word Ministers are fond of—transparency.

If time had permitted, we might have sought a vote on amendment No. 18, but we do not want to detain the House in too many Divisions this afternoon and this evening. It may well be that the matter is revisited in another place, but the amendment expresses our concern that the Bill threatens the freedom of all UK citizens. Our concerns are widely shared across the political spectrum by organisations like Justice and Liberty, traditionally perceived as being on the left, and the Democracy Movement and the Freedom Association, traditionally thought of as on the right. Once again, I urge the Government to think about exactly what they are doing.

I know that it would be embarrassing for the Government to do that because they have already signed up to the framework decision, but in the Labour-dominated Select Committee on Home Affairs many concerns were expressed about the way in which justice systems operate, not only in current EU countries such as Italy, Spain and Greece, but—this was raised in particular by my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Mr. Maples), a distinguished former shadow Foreign Secretary and shadow Defence Secretary—in future EU countries such as, perhaps, Turkey and ex-Warsaw pact countries. Distinguished jurists such as

Leo Price QC and Torquil Dick Ericson have written extensively about those concerns, as have many specialist extradition lawyers practising in the UK who deal with the sharp end of extradition cases. We referred to a number of those concerns in Committee. We need the protections that we are suggesting, and I stress again that we will not withdraw amendment No. 20, but will press it to a Division.

The hon. Gentleman said that he wants to include the European arrest warrant in the Bill, and that that is the purpose of amendment No. 20 in particular. However, does he accept that clause 2(3)(b) states that

"the Part 1 warrant is issued with a view to his arrest and extradition to the category 1 territory for the purpose of being prosecuted for the offence"?

The key word is "prosecuted". In view of that and the assurance that my hon. Friend the Minister gave me, does the hon. Gentleman not think that his concern has been covered?

I do not accept that. Almost exactly the same words as those that the hon. Gentleman has just read out were used by the Minister in a letter to me about the issues that we raised in Committee. We feel that it would be much better and clearer if the specific wording that we suggest were included in the Bill.

Government amendments Nos. 35 and 36, as the Minister said, represent a significant concession made in response to concerns that we have raised, along with members of his own party and the Home Affairs Committee. We stressed that any warrants should be issued only by judicial authorities overseas. We are rather concerned that in Government amendment No. 37, the Government want a transitional right to disapply the concession if a country has already used the so-called Schengen information system for requests before 1 January 2004. We are not comfortable with the disapplication—the restriction to a judicial authority should apply to all requests whenever they are made. We do not have much faith in bureaucratic European administrative systems of justice, about which we have expressed concerns before. I do not want to be churlish—we recognise that the main thrust of the Government amendments is to make a concession in response to concerns expressed by the Home Affairs Committee and us—but there is an element of giving with one hand then snatching a little bit back with the other.

Government amendment No. 43 and the linked Government amendment No. 63 deal with the need to define the standard of proof to be used when determining the fugitive's identity at the initial hearing. I understand from a letter that the Minister wrote to me that there was particular concern following the tragic and appalling murder of Detective Constable Oake in Manchester. When the defendant appeared in court, the Crown Prosecution Service said that it could not be certain that the information that it had on the defendant's identity was correct. In the light of that tragic and appalling case, which once again demonstrated how much we owe to the brave police officers who are dealing with those matters at the sharp end, we have to bear in mind the standard of proof used to determine identity. The Government have chosen the civil balance of probabilities test. There was quite a bit of discussion about what was the appropriate test in Committee, and we accept the Government's concern about terrorists and other serious criminals who may seek actively to destroy any documents from which they could be identified. However, we also need to look at the case of the blameless British pensioner Derek Bond, who was arrested in South Africa on the request of the FBI. What would a balance of probabilities test of identity have led to if a European requesting state were using a European arrest warrant to arrest somebody?

I am not a lawyer—I say that as a matter of pride, although I have never held it against my hon. Friend that he is. With reference to the extensive and as yet unamended scope of the European arrest warrant, what assessment has he made of the compatibility of the Government's intended policy with the content of the subsidiarity and proportionality protocol of the treaty of Amsterdam?

We have many concerns about the European arrest warrant. We do not think that it is proportional, and the Government were wrong to sign up to the framework decision before these matters were debated in Parliament. My hon. Friend is therefore on to something. However, we have to recognise—I hope that the Minister will bear this serious point in mind—that when talking about what should be the appropriate standard of proof we are talking about the lesser of two evils. I am sure that in another place those who are very learned in the law will return to this point, but I accept the choice that the Government made for the reasons set out by the Minister today, in Committee and in correspondence. However, he, in turn, will accept that this is a serious matter and that there can be two different views on which is the lesser of two evils. I therefore hope that he and those who work with him will keep that under review when the Bill goes to another place.

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Government amendments Nos. 42, 59 and 62, which are linked, represent a welcome concession to a point that we raised in Committee—it was also raised by the Select Committee on Home Affairs—that the district judge should ensure that the person arrested is shown the warrant that is the basis for that person's arrest.

Amendment No. 4 seeks to leave out clause 39. I stress to the Minister, who was expressing some puzzlement about where we were coming from, that we wanted to probe to ensure that we would be able on Report to examine the problem of someone who may claim to be seeking asylum. The Minister has said that he wants there to be a fall-back position where the Secretary of State can say, "This is clearly a bogus claim." We were saying that always, in every case, the matter of whether someone should be extradited—we are talking in many cases about potential terrorists and serious criminals—should be gone through first, and that no delays should be injected into the system by way of somebody submitting an asylum case.

Colleagues who served in Committee, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon, were extremely concerned about the delays that the pre- existing system has injected. We know that one of the ways in which so many people who might properly be extradited have delayed the process in the past has been by claiming asylum. I see the Minister nodding his assent to that. That is what we were getting at. I hope that the Minister will keep this serious issue under review. All Members of all parties in the House know that there is great concern throughout the United Kingdom about bogus asylum seekers and about the number who disappear into the black economy, where the Government have no way of finding them, or deporting those who may be a threat to our security and have no right to be here.

We do not want another category being created of those who should be deported because they should be extradited to face charges elsewhere delaying matters by claiming asylum. The misuse of our legal system by a man called Rachid Ramda was referred to extensively by my hon. Friend the Member for Stratford-on-Avon. The French authorities wanted him extradited from the UK to face very serious charges to do with the bombing of the Paris metro. I have heard what the Minister has said, but I hope in responding to the debate he will confirm that he and those who advise him will keep this serious matter under review.

I hope that by tabling the amendment we will avoid the tendency of the Minister, the Home Secretary and, indeed, the Prime Minister to misdescribe the Opposition's position, wrongly accusing us of being soft or stopping the Government being tough when we have raised concerns about their legislation. It is clear that we are trying to persuade the Government to toughen up their proposals and to close loopholes. We hope that they will understand our point of view and where we are coming from, and will not seek to misrepresent our position in future debates or in another place.

Government amendments Nos. 50, 67 and 69, which are linked, are welcome concessions to points that we raised in Committee. It is vital that a person considering giving consent to extradition must have had an opportunity to obtain independent legal advice first before consenting. The Minister says that he has thought about that and is prepared to accept that we were correct on that matter in Committee. I am glad that the Government have listened to us and to concerns expressed from many other sources and have made the concessions.

Amendment No. 92 has been tabled by the Liberal Democrats. I agree with the Minister that it is perhaps a minor matter that does not add very much, but no doubt the Liberal Democrats will speak to their amendment.

Government amendments Nos. 53 to 56 and 70 to 73, which are linked, bring terminology in line with the Courts Bill. The Minister said that he would not spend much time on these amendments unless someone asked him to do so. However, when he responds to the debate, I would ask him to cover one particular point. The Courts Bill, of course, is not yet law. It has had what I think could accurately be described as a rocky passage in another place. I suspect that that passage will continue when the proposed legislation comes to this place. More and more Labour Back-Bench Members have been lobbied—I watched that happen as recently as last week—by angry lay magistrates, who are furious at the Government's broken promises over the Courts Bill.

I hope that the Government realise that they should not assume in trying to amend this Bill to fit in with the Courts Bill that the Courts Bill will get through Parliament in its current form. We drew attention in Committee to the Government's lack of joined-up government—a phrase that they often use—with yet another measure in their huge raft of Home Office Bills, which is the Crime (International Co-operation) Bill, which has also begun its passage in another place. We sought to put a line in that Bill and also in the Bill that is before us to suggest that the two measures needed to be co-ordinated. The Government resisted that approach in Committee and the issue was not selected for debate today. I hope that the Government, having said that the Bill needs to fit in with the Courts Bill, will not forget the Crime (International Co-operation) Bill.

Government amendments Nos. 65 and 66 are, again, a Government concession, dealing with evidence in summary form. They seek to deal with concerns that we and the Home Affairs Committee expressed. The Government are removing "must" in clause 83 and replacing it with "may", to make it clear that a judge does not have to accept evidence where the provenance or credibility of that evidence is in doubt. We welcome that concession to the important points that we made in Committee.

Liberal Democrat amendments Nos. 93 and 94 are on the same point. They seek to delete parts of clauses 83 and 85, and also go to the issue of "must".

Government amendments Nos. 14 and 6, which are linked, are technical Scottish amendments. They make it clear that Scottish Ministers exercise functions only when the fugitive is in Scotland.

Government amendments Nos. 76, 77 and 11 are technical amendments that relate to who the appropriate judge is when a case is deferred after a competing request has been submitted. We have no problem with that.

Government amendments Nos. 12 and 13 deal with Scottish legal terminology. I remember the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) telling us in Committee about acts of adjournal, and about appeals being abandoned, not discontinued, in Scotland. We are glad that the Government have listened to Scots lawyers on these points. There are further Scottish issues that we will come to when dealing with another group of amendments. Having put forward the amendments on which we feel strongly, that is all that I need to say about this group of amendments.

As a lead into this group of amendments, we have always accepted for category 1 countries mutual recognition. We understand that. However, we do not believe that there should be mutual recognition without safeguards. It is imperative that there are safeguards.

I welcome some of the amendments that the Government have introduced, which have been referred to by both the Minister and the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins), which contain safeguards in relation to matters that especially concerned us. I refer particularly to specialty, and the new clause that relates to the death penalty. No country that still imposes the death penalty should be within category 1. That is clear from the Government's amendment.

I am glad that the Government have decided to make the appropriate Scottish amendments following the arguments that were advanced in Committee by my hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael).

We had a great deal of help from the Select Committee on Home Affairs during consideration of the Bill in Committee. The Minister has made a number of concessions in relation to matters that were raised not only by the Home Affairs Committee but also by the Standing Committee. The Minister has said that he has made it clear that there was no intention to designate anyone other than United Kingdom enforcement personnel as an "appropriate person", and we welcome the clauses that make it clear that only constables, officers of Customs and Excise and armed forces police officers will be able to execute the European arrest warrant.

There were further important discussions on judicial authority and its definition. Government amendments Nos. 35 to 37 make it clear that the warrant will be acceptable only if it has been issued by judicial authority. The hon. Member for Surrey Heath mentioned his concerns about the transitional provisions, which I share. In the other place, there will be opportunities for further probing and discussion of those arrangements. Our amendments seek to tighten up the procedure, and I shall advert to them shortly.

In particular, I am pleased in connection with the definition of the standard proof in determining a fugitive's identity. That will also be considered in the other place, with regard to whether a balance of probabilities is the right basis for a judgment or whether the matter should be beyond all reasonable doubt. The Minister made the point that extradition is not prosecution, which I accept.

I should like now to deal with the Liberal Democrat amendments. We tabled amendment No. 92, which seeks to amend clause 65, because we believe that the designated authority must be satisfied that the authority issuing the warrant in the category 1 country has that function. That must be clear beyond all reasonable doubt. The warrant should not be issued by anybody other than that authority and the judge must be satisfied that that is the case. The amendment would provide an additional safeguard and I look forward to hearing the Minister's view about it.

Amendments Nos. 93 and 94 seek to amend clauses 83 and 85. They are similar amendments that seek to strike out subsections with exactly the same wording:

"A summary in a document of a statement made by a person must be treated as a statement made by the person in the document for the purposes of subsection (2)."

Although this matter might sound arcane, those are very important points. A summary is not good enough. A judge must see the evidence itself. A summary by someone other than the person in question is almost hearsay about hearsay. We must have what the person actually said and not what someone else believes they said. There is room for huge error and abuse in this matter. I believe that the Minister said that there was no way that a defendant could be prevented from giving evidence in person, but we must face the fact that the defendant will not be present to do so in all such cases.

As I said, we have made progress with the Bill and the Government have made concessions, which is welcome. Nevertheless, for reasons that we will explore later, not least the fact that we have not been satisfied about minimum standards of justice in all putative category 1 countries and about the nebulousness of the 32 offences set out in the Bill—a matter that we will have a chance to discuss later—we must have safeguards in the light of the shortcomings that exist. It is our job today, just as it will be the job of Members of the other place, to tighten up the Bill to ensure that there are no miscarriages of justice and that justice and fairness prevail in respect of our country.

I shall speak very briefly, because, like the hon. Member for Buckingham (Mr. Bercow), I am not a lawyer and a m rather proud of that fact. None the less, serving on the Standing Committee for a few sittings, which felt like many months, gave me a crash course in the law of England and Scotland, for which I am grateful.

1.45 pm

I should like to respond to the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) with regard to Government amendment No. 43, which relates to the "balance of probabilities" in respect of a fugitive's identity. I understand why people are concerned about the case of Mr. Derek Bond, who was unjustly and unwisely held in South Africa for two weeks while the FBI carried out investigations, but I think that the public would be ill-served if we picked on that one specific and dramatic case as a reason for saying that the balance of probabilities should not be used in relation to the identity of a wanted person. The case was particularly unusual, and we as politicians must accept that, because of the intricate and sophisticated nature of intercontinental investigations, the identity of suspects occasionally cannot be verified and mistakes are made, but that does not necessarily mean that we will not pursue those investigations. We must remember that, in the case of Mr. Bond, to whom we all feel sympathetic, the true identity of the suspect was revealed after much investigation. I do not think that his case can be used as a reason for saying that we can give up on that specific type of inquiry by the FBI or any other international agencies.

On amendment No. 4, which is an Opposition amendment, asylum is a big issue in my constituency and those of many other hon. Members. If we accept the amendment, we will completely remove from the Bill all references to asylum. Contrary to what the hon. Member for Surrey Heath suggested, that does not mean that asylum would no longer be used as a way of delaying procedures. As I understand it, the deletion of clause 39 would ensure that there were no guidelines at all about whether and in what circumstances accused persons could apply for asylum. I have personal experience of people claiming asylum for all sorts of ill-chosen motives.

I would like to hear whether the hon. Gentleman accepts that the removal of clause 39 would create a far less specific and more vague asylum system. As the Bill would contain no specific reference to asylum, people on whom warrants were enforced would use every possible means, including asylum, to delay their extradition. Some people may accuse the Government of being a bit too harsh on asylum seekers by refusing to accept the amendment. I disagree. The Bill already contains a very specific measure that allows people to appeal against an asylum decision that goes against them, albeit that that appeal has to be made outside the country. I welcome that; in the circumstances, I think it is absolutely justified.

Amendment No. 18 is fantastic. I love it: only the Conservative party could have tabled an amendment saying that a British or English court can force these Johnny Foreigner courts to send someone home right away because we in this country do not think that they have met their obligations or that their legal system is quite up to the mark. When I read the amendment, I thought, "Only the Conservative party, God bless it, could come up with this sort of imperialist nonsense." The hon. Member for Surrey Heath mentioned that he had some reservations about the terrible bureaucracy in some foreign regimes. Once again—I would have laid money on this—he could not resist mentioning the plane spotters arrested in Greece, who were referred to many times every day in the Standing Committee. The idea that a British judge can decide that a foreign court is not quite up to speed and that we can demand that it sends a suspect back to Britain because we are not happy with its procedures is mind blowing. I hope that the Opposition will force that amendment to a vote, as it defines the philosophy of the modern Conservative party far more than many other things. It is the Ealing comedy amendment. Only in the late 1940s and early 1950s could people have taken such an amendment seriously.

Let us consider the serious point of reciprocity. Does the hon. Member for Surrey Heath believe that a French, German or Greek court should be allowed to tell a British court that its procedures are incorrect, and that it should send the relevant person back home for trial? I presume that the hon. Gentleman supports the principle of reciprocity and believes that that should be the effect of the amendment, in which case he would be more than happy with the consequences that I outlined. I salute him if that is his genuine conviction; the Conservative party would have turned a corner. However, the amendment is neither reasonable nor acceptable to the majority of people in this country.

My hon. Friend the Minister gave commitment after commitment in Committee, and made it clear that the Bill explicitly provides that no one will be extradited for anything other than a trial or a sentence. It was made clear many times that the Bill does not provide for extradition for investigation or interrogation. I therefore ask the hon. Member for Surrey Heath to accept my hon. Friend's sincerity. He made the point clear many times. We spent day after day in Committee, with no doubt about the terms of the Bill. I ask the Opposition to accept that there is no need for amendment No. 18, except for comic relief.

For the first time in British legislation, a Bill makes a specific, explicit commitment to protect people from extradition for anything other than serving a sentence or facing trial. The Extradition Act 1989, which was passed under the Conservative Government, made no such distinction or commitment. For the first time, therefore, a Government are committed not to extradite for any reason apart from serving a sentence or facing a trial. I partly hope that the Opposition will press amendment No. 18 to a vote because I would enjoy voting against it. I hope, though, that they will consider it inappropriate.

I congratulate the Minister on the extent to which he listened to the debate in Committee and made appropriate adjustments to the Bill. Everyone accepts that he is going a long way—in some cases, further than some of us wanted.

I understand from the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins), who opened the debate for the Opposition, that they intend to press amendment No. 20, but not amendment No. 18, to a vote. I am at a loss, because amendment No. 20 states:

"The statement referred to in subsections (3) and (5) shall conform with the provisions of the model warrant annexed to the framework decision."

Clause 2(3)(b) appears to cover all the anxieties that the Opposition expressed in Committee and today. When I intervened on the hon. Gentleman to point that out, he dismissed my comment and said that the Opposition would press the amendment anyway.

I wonder why, given that the Bill covers the hon. Gentleman's anxieties, he wants to include an additional provision that would have the same effect. The obvious conclusion is that he believes that the amendment would circumvent the European arrest warrant. At least, the Opposition want an opportunity to vote against the European arrest warrant. They would probably be happy with it if it were called a "common arrest warrant" or an "arrest warrant for co-operation between states". However, the magic word "Europe" means that they feel obliged to reject it.

I have not made those comments to poke fun at the Opposition because, by Labour party standards, I am reasonably Eurosceptical. However, a gulf exists between me and most Opposition Members, who appear to feel an obligation to vote against anything European.

As the hon. Gentleman said, it is not clear whether amendment No. 20 will be pressed to a vote, but does he believe that it would alter the text of the Bill? One could argue that it would introduce legal clarity because it refers to

"the model warrant annexed to the framework decision."

If the hon. Lady wants greater clarification about what was in the minds of the Opposition, she should have intervened on the hon. Member for Surrey Heath. I have made it a firm principle in my political career never to answer for the Conservative party. I intend to stick to that rigidly.

The Opposition and the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett) made serious points today and in Committee about specific cases. My hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Harris) made it clear a few moments ago that it is generally wise to legislate not on specific cases but on general categories. Many hon. Members who are lawyers and are better versed than I am in these things could testify to that.

I want to revert to an example that was used in Committee because it involves a constituent. Today, the hon. Member for Surrey Heath mentioned the case of Derek Bond, which was heard after our Committee proceedings. He also recounted the case of the plane spotters in Greece. However, in Committee, the case of my constituent Kevan Sloane, who is currently serving a three-and-a-half year sentence in Tenerife, was cited. None of the people in the three cases had to return to this country and subsequently be extradited to the country where the offence was committed. Since my constituent has been mentioned, I want to make his position clear.

Kevan Sloane was arrested approximately two years ago, initially on five charges of armed robbery. By the time the case got to court, he faced two charges of armed robbery and he was eventually convicted of one. The standard of evidence required to convict him was poor. Two aspects were highly questionable.

First, my constituent was picked out in an identity parade by a shop assistant who worked in the shop where he had allegedly committed armed robbery. However, the woman had been shown a photograph of him before the identity parade.

2 pm

The second piece of evidence given in court was that the perpetrator of the offence in question spoke colloquial Spanish. Apart from visiting his mother in Tenerife occasionally, my constituent has spent all his life in Kirby, and could hardly be thought capable of speaking colloquial Spanish. Nevertheless, despite that and despite the lack of any direct corroborative evidence, he was convicted.

The hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon said in Committee that that case proved the unreliability of foreign courts and the need for additional protections. I believe that my constituent was convicted on the basis of hopelessly flawed evidence, and the proceedings took place in Tenerife—and Madrid, where my constituent's appeal was turned down. I do not think, however, that the Bill would have made any difference, because my constituent was never in this country to be extradited in the first place.

I know that that case causes the hon. Gentleman enormous concerns and that he is a doughty fighter for his constituent, for which I pay tribute to him, but I think that my point in Committee was valid. Before we pass the Bill, we should ensure that minimum standards apply, especially in category 1 countries. In Committee, I gave examples of countries where such standards certainly did not apply.

The hon. Gentleman's whole argument hinges on the question of minimum standards, a phrase also used by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath. I accept the need for minimum standards, but all the countries involved signed the framework document and therefore, at least in principle, are "signed up to" minimum standards. I believe that there was a miscarriage of justice in my constituent's case, but to make a general case against the legal system in Spain and Tenerife is, in my view, to go a step too far.

I do not want to repeat all that was said in Committee, but in some EU countries there is no legal aid; in some EU countries there is no provision for interpreters; in some EU countries judges are appointed at the age of 21, and are paid a derisory salary. People are concerned about that, and so they should be.

I am concerned. My point is that commitment to the principle of minimum standards is evidenced by the fact that those countries signed the framework document. Unless the hon. Gentleman thinks it should never be recognised that a country is capable of signing up to a principle and delivering on that over time, he will surely agree that it is not the job of the House or of legislation passed here to redesign the legal systems of other countries, or to require the redesigning of those systems.

As my hon. Friend the Minister said, if we pursued such ideas to their logical conclusion we would find ourselves returning to the foreign policy of Palmerston, and to gunboat diplomacy. I do not intend to bore the House with a recital of the Don Pacifico affair, but surely the Opposition do not really want us to return to those days.

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

I will give way once more, but I want to finish my speech soon.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way a third time. All we are saying is that before a fast-track procedure comes into play, minimum standards should apply in fast-track countries.

I do not know how many times I can reply to the hon. Gentleman's question without repeating myself, which he is doing. Let me simply say that while I accept the need for minimum standards, all those countries signed the framework document and, in doing so, committed themselves to such standards. The fact that the standards do not always apply in specific cases does not alter the fact that the principle has been accepted. It is for the countries to decide, over time, how to implement it.

I end where I began. Although I do not suspect devious motives, I think the Opposition would rather vote against the whole of this part of the Bill than just vote for their amendment. If truth be told, they probably feel that they must make a stand, and are hanging their hat on amendment No. 20. I do not think amendment No. 20 is appropriate for the purpose; they should have been a little bolder, and voted against the whole section.

I shall try to be brief, and deal only with the most important points. Let me deal first with what was said by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) and supported by the hon. Member for Torridge and North Devon.

West Devon.

It is disgraceful that Devon should be moved around like that—unforgivable, indeed. I mean the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett).

Both Members suggested that the list was too vague, and that dropping dual criminality posed a risk to justice. What strikes me is that no one has been able to give even a bad example of how the arrest warrant proposals might have made a difference.

Opposition Members have majored on the Greek plane spotters case, which was not an extradition case. The plane spotters were accused of an offence that is also an offence in British law, so the dropping of dual criminality would have made no difference. Similarly, the constituent of my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth) was accused of a crime that exists in British law. As for the Derek Bond case, in which the extradition to the United States of a person who was in South Africa was sought, nothing in the Bill would have affected that either.

No one will be subjected to a "vague list". The generic list is there to facilitate mutual recognition, and to end the requirement for dual criminality in cases covered by it. In the case of any and every request for extradition under the European arrest warrant procedures, the specific crime of which the person is accused will be spelt out on the warrant. It must be an offence in the requesting state: there is nothing vague about that. It must be an offence in French law, or in German law, but not in British law. We expect people who come to our country to abide by our laws and not their own, and the reverse must also be true. We have said that many times, but it needs to be said again.

The case of Derek Bond raises the issue of identity. The acceptance of the European arrest warrant in our courts, and the issue of identity that arises before extradition, will be dealt with by a British judge. Anyone who says "I am sorry, but I am not the person who is sought in this warrant" will be able to make that case before a British judge.

I am listening to the Minister with interest. If his argument is that the removal of the dual criminality test will have no practical effect, why is he removing it?

That is not quite the argument that I was making, as the right hon. Gentleman knows. What I said was that the cases that have been prayed in aid against the proposals will not be affected by the proposals in any way. They occurred under current legislation and have nothing to do with dual criminality; indeed, the Greek plane spotters case had nothing to do with extradition. As I have said before, we have three choices. We live in a European Union in which we can all travel freely between our jurisdictions, and huge benefits flow from that, both economically and in terms of individual freedom. However, that point also applies to criminals. We can stand pat and hide behind arcane, cumbersome and extremely expensive extradition arrangements that are hard to operate, and say that that is the barrier against the rest of the world; we can seek to develop a European framework of justice; or we can enter into a method of mutual recognition that enables us to co-operate in an effective and modern way with our European partners.

Those are the three choices, but the Conservatives appear to have decided, despite the right hon. Gentleman's attempt to gloss over this issue, that they should stand aloof from the rest of the world and behave like a solitary little island, and to ignore the very real problems that would arise in respect of our ability to do justice to the victims of crimes committed in this country.

We will be able to discuss the general points that the Minister is making, and which are wholly misconceived, on Third Reading, but the interesting question is this. Is he admitting that the removal of dual criminality will in fact have a range of practical effects, or is he arguing that it is otiose to remove it? I cannot understand how he can avoid telling the House which of those is the case.

As I said in Committee—it was also said on Second Reading, and it continues to be our position—the removal of dual criminality is essential to putting in place a streamlined system; there is little doubt about that.

Will it have a practical effect?

Of course it will have a practical effect. While we are able to bring up issues of dual criminality, which repeatedly happens under current extradition regulations, people will be denied the opportunity to delay and to frustrate by using dual criminality arguments. That will be the practical effect, and that is why we are choosing to go down this road.

The hon. Member for Surrey Heath said that although he welcomed my efforts in respect of naming, through the Bill, those who can apply for a European arrest warrant as a judicial authority, he felt that I was taking back with one hand as I was giving with the other. He was joined in that view by the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon, who raised concerns about the transitional arrangements for the Schengen information system.

All that I said is that the issue needs to be looked at again more thoroughly, and that it will be scrutinised in the other place.

If the hon. Gentleman supports me, I will accept his support, but I am not sure that that is the situation.

I turn to the reason why we intended to include the term "judicial authority" from the start, other than the existing transitional problem. As I have said, all the warrants currently on the Schengen information system were originally backed by a domestic warrant, which was cleared by a judicial authority. In order to give the concession requested, and to make the permanent situation as clear as the hon. Member for Surrey Heath wants it to be, we need that transitional arrangement—unless we are to refuse to extradite where existing warrants apply, or to provide people with an opportunity to question their validity, despite their being backed initially by judicial decisions.

2.15 pm

I thank my hon. Friends for their support on these issues, and I thank Members of both Opposition parties for their general tone, and for their welcome for the concessions that have been made. I am not surprised that I have been unable entirely to satisfy them, given some of the views that have been expressed. Those views were exposed by my hon. Friends in discussing amendment No. 18, for example. I ask the House to support the Government's amendments, and to reject those moved by the Opposition parties.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

New clause 5—Unconscionable delay—

(1) This section applies if the Secretary of State believes that the conditions in subsections (2) and (3) are satisfied in relation to a person.

(2) The first condition is that the person's extradition is sought or will be sought under Part 1 or Part 2 in respect of an offence.

(3) The second condition is that there has been unconscionable delay between the time when the offence for which extradition is sought was committed and the extradition request.

(4) The Secretary of State may certify that the conditions in subsections (2) and (3) are satisfied in relation to the person.

(5) If the Secretary of State issues a certificate under subsection (4) he may—

(a) direct that a Part 1 warrant issued in respect of the person and in respect of the offence is not to be proceeded with, or

(b) direct that a request for the person's extradition in respect of the offence is not to be proceeded with.

(6) If the Secretary of State issues a certificate under subsection (4) he may order the person's discharge (instead of or in addition to giving a direction under subsection (5)).

(7) These rules apply if the Secretary of State gives a direction under subsection (5)(a) in respect of a warrant—

(a) if the designated authority has not issued a certificate under section 2 in respect of the warrant it must not do so;

(b) if the person is arrested under the warrant or under section 5 there is no requirement for him to be brought before the appropriate judge and he must be discharged;

(c) if the person is brought before the appropriate judge under section 4 or 6 the judge is no longer required to proceed or continue proceeding under sections 7 and 8;

(d) if the extradition hearing has begun the judge is no longer required to proceed or continue proceeding under sections 10 to 25;

(e) if the person has consented to his extradition, the judge is no longer required to order his extradition;

(f) if an appeal to the High Court or House of Lords has been brought, the court is no longer required to hear or continue hearing the appeal;

(g) if the person's extradition has been ordered there is no requirement for him to be extradited.

(8) These rules apply if the Secretary of State gives a direction under subsection (5)(b) in respect of a request—

(a) if he has not issued a certificate under section 69 in respect of the request he is no longer required to do so;

(b) if the person is arrested under a warrant issued under section 70 or under a provisional warrant there is no requirement for him to appear or be brought before the appropriate judge and he must be discharged;

(c) if the person appears or is brought before the appropriate judge the judge is no longer required to proceed or continue proceeding under sections 71, 73, 74 and 75;

(d) if the extradition hearing has begun the judge is no longer required to proceed or continue proceeding under sections 77 to 88;

(e) if the person has given his consent to his extradition to the appropriate judge, the judge is no longer required to send the case to the Secretary of State for his decision whether the person is to be extradited;

(f) if an appeal to the High Court or House of Lords has been brought, the court is no longer required to hear or continue hearing the appeal;

(g) if the person's extradition has been ordered there is no requirement for him to be extradited.

(9) These must be made under the hand of the Secretary of State—

(a) a certificate under subsection (4);

(b) a direction under subsection (5);

(c) an order under subsection (6).

(10) The preceding provisions of this section apply to Scotland with these modifications—

(a) in subsection (8)(a) for "he has" substitute "the Scottish Ministers have" and for "he is" substitute "they are";

(b) in subsection (8)(e) for "Secretary of State for his" substitute "Scottish Ministers for their".

(11) In subsection (2) the reference to an enactment includes an enactment comprised in or in an instrument made under, an Act of the Scottish Parliament'.

New clause 8—Passage of time—

'A person's extradition to a category 1 territory is barred by reason of the passage of time if it appears it would be unjust or oppressive or not proportional in all the circumstances to extradite him by reason of the passage of time since he is alleged to have committed the extradition offence or since he is alleged to have become unlawfully at large (as the case may be).'.

New clause 9—Referral of Part 1 warrant to Secretary of State—

`.(1) Where a Part 1 warrant has been issued in connection with conduct which would not constitute an offence under the law of the relevant part of the United Kingdom, that warrant must be referred to the Secretary of State, who must make a decision separate to any decision of the appropriate judge as to whether extradition to the requesting country would be proper in all the circumstances.

(2) The Secretary of State must make an annual report to both Houses of Parliament on the cases in which he has exercised his discretion as set out in subsection (1) above and the reasons for the exercise of his discretion in each case.'.

New clause 19—Injustice and oppression—

'.—A person's extradition to a category 2 territory is barred if it appears that because the accusation against him is not made in good faith in the interests of justice it would, having regard to all the circumstances, be unjust or oppressive to return him.'.

Government amendment No. 45. Amendment No. 23, in page 6, line 19 [Clause 11], at end insert—

'() passage of time;'.

Government amendments Nos. 47, 49, 51 and 52.

Amendment No. 5, in page 30, line 38 [Clause 63], leave out

'12 months'

and insert

'3 years'.

Amendment No. 91, in page 40, line 35 [Clause 78], at end insert—

`;—

(e) injustice and oppression'.

Government amendment No. 74.

This list of amendments is not quite so extensive, but there are still some issues to deal with, and I shall take the least controversial first. Government amendments Nos. 49, 51, 52 and 74 relate to the speciality waiver and further extradition to a category 1 territory. Under the Bill as drafted, the UK was able to adopt a higher position on speciality, which means that we could agree on a reciprocal basis with a part 1 extradition partner that they, and we, can, after extradition, presume our consent to the person being prosecuted for offences committed before extradition took place. However, grave concerns were expressed about this issue, and we listened to the worries expressed by members of the Standing Committee, and of the Home Affairs Committee. We have therefore decided that the reference to the use of the higher position on speciality and re-extradition should be removed from the Bill, and these amendments achieve that aim.

Government amendment No. 47 is a purely technical amendment. It takes account of the possibility that such conduct might not constitute a criminal offence in the UK. In such circumstances, the district judge is required to apply the test of assuming that the conduct is contrary to UK law, and of then establishing whether the rule of double jeopardy prevents extradition.

I turn to perhaps meatier issues: the passage of time bar to extradition, Government new clause 11 and Government amendment No. 45, and new clause 8 and its consequential amendment. The Government amendments duplicate the bar to extradition already contained in part 2 of the Bill. We made that change in the light of concerns expressed during consultation on the draft Bill, and in Standing Committee. Where extradition would be unjust or oppressive, as a result of the amount of time that has elapsed, it would in any case be prevented under the Bill's provisions on human rights. However, we have listened to the arguments and see no harm in giving the judge the explicit direction to consider the question of the passage of time. I hope that Opposition Members will be happy to accept the proposed change.

New clause 5 would give the Secretary of State the power to intervene in any case where there had been an unconscionable delay. I am not quite sure what Opposition Members believe the Secretary of State could bring to resolving such an issue, or how he could make a decision on unconscionable delay that contradicted the district judge. That judge's decisions are already subject to appeal to the High Court and, on points of law, to the House of Lords, so why add the Secretary of State to the process? That would open up the avenue for the legal challenge and judicial review, which would delay the proceedings. I hope that Opposition Members will accept that that the new clause is unnecessary, especially when we are including in the Bill the requirement for the district judge to consider the passage of time directly.

On new clause 9, the Opposition present us with an opportunity to say that, if the crime for which the person is requested is not an offence in the UK, the Secretary of State should decide whether that extradition would be proper. I am not sure exactly what that means. A warrant would be issued by a body that we recognise—and have recognised for some time—for extradition purposes, and certified by our central authority, the National Criminal Intelligence Service, for an offence committed in a requesting state that is punishable in that state by at least the threshold amount. The Home Secretary, we are told, should decide whether that is proper. I look forward to hearing Opposition Members explain how the Secretary of State should go about deciding whether the decisions taken by the judicial authority of one of our European partners are proper.

I do not want to preempt my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins), but the Minister might like to ask any one of the Labour members of the Select Committee who voted for the report and in favour of a specific clause that was similar to the new clause. It would give the Home Secretary a backstop power, in cases in which the crime in question was not an offence in the UK, to do precisely what the new clause suggests.

Members of the Select Committee must speak for themselves, but I am not sure that they were seeking to do what the hon. Gentleman suggests. I can speak only to the new clause tabled by Opposition Members. I would be interested to hear—I did not hear it in the hon. Gentleman's intervention—how the Secretary of State is to decide whether the decision, say, of a French magistrate, to request extradition was proper. I may have gone to a different school from the hon. Gentleman's, but I do not see how he could get his head around that problem. Even if he could, any decision taken would be subject to judicial review and we would be left with appeals and delays—precisely what we are trying to avoid.

If people from another EU country came here and broke our law, would we expect that country to put them on trial? The fact that the conduct in question was not contrary to the law of their home country would be no excuse. How would we feel about a French Minister deciding whether our request was proper? I ask Opposition Members to view the problem in reverse perspective and think more about the consequences of what they are proposing.

The second limb of new clause 9 requires the Secretary of State to produce an annual report on the operation of the legislation. We do not believe that the Home Secretary should perform the role conferred on him by the Opposition in this new clause; nor do we see any need for an annual report. Home Office Ministers are answerable to Parliament and have to answer questions on the operation of extradition and other legislation—including details of the number of cases and the average time taken to process them. I see no reason for a formal annual report. No such requirement obtains in existing legislation and I see no reason to move in that direction.

Amendment No. 5 is designed to limit the removal of dual criminality to offences attracting a three-year sentence, rather than a one-year sentence, as the Bill currently provides. The basic threshold for extradition that has operated for many years is set at 12 months, and we do not believe that it would be sensible to set a different threshold for the application of the dual criminality role. To do so would be a recipe for confusion. More than that, if hon. Gentlemen take the view that dual criminality is so important and necessary to prevent injustice when dealing with requests from another EU country—not a view that the Government share—why should that safeguard apply only to offences attracting a penalty of between one and three years, but not to more serious offences for which the person concerned potentially faces a longer period in prison? It would be illogical to impose a dual criminality requirement at the lower end of the offence scale, but not to impose such a requirement at the upper end.

Secondly, I do not see why the UK's approach, in giving effect to European Union instruments, should always be characterised by doing the bare minimum necessary to comply, but I doubt whether many Opposition Members would agree. We have led on mutual recognition and we should seek to set an example to others. Several UK offences have no parallel in other European states, so there would be clear advantages for the UK and for the victims of crime here if other EU member states chose to go beyond the framework decision in respect of dual criminality.

I shall now deal with Liberal Democrat new clause 19 and consequential amendment No. 91, which would add a further specific bar to extradition. I support the motives behind the amendments: we should not countenance extradition in circumstances in which it would be unjust or oppressive because the accusation ha .s not been made in good faith. However, the Bill requires no such enhancement. The bars already included in part 2, under clause 78, cover double jeopardy, extraneous considerations, passage of time and hostage taking. It is important also to remember that the whole Bill has the protections of the European convention on human rights firmly enshrined in it.

Clause 80, "Extraneous considerations", specifically covers where the request has been made for the purpose of punishing the person on the grounds of

"race, religion, nationality or political opinions."

Extradition is barred if a person would be prejudiced at trial or have his liberty restricted for any of those reasons. I do not believe that any additional requirement is necessary, and there is a risk that the amendments would be counterproductive. Their language is so subjective that they would present fugitives with a golden opportunity to block and frustrate the extradition process by creating additional grounds for appeal.

I am sorry for taking the House's time, but I wanted to cover all the amendments in this group. I hope that Opposition Members will be prepared to withdraw the new clauses and amendments in their names.

This substantial group of amendments is not quite as large as the previous group. I want to deal first with the Government new clauses. It is a measure of the lack of enthusiasm for the Bill among Labour Members, especially those who belong to the Labour-dominated Home Affairs Committee, that the Minister has no one behind him on the Government Benches apart from his Parliamentary Private Secretary.

Government new clause 11, and the linked Government amendment No. 45, amount to a significant concession. We welcome the Government's agreement to insert in part 1 of the Bill a "passage of time" bar to extradition, as proposed in my amendment No. 23. That is very similar to what the Government have proposed for part 2 cases.

In Standing Committee, I explained how clients of expert extradition solicitors such as Victor, Lissack and Roscoe had suffered injustice as a result of the huge delays in other countries' legal systems. We welcome the Government's concession, and I welcome what the Minister has said today. The Government's proposal in response to the Opposition's new clause 8 and amendment No. 23, which were tabled before the Bill reached the present Report stage, and therefore before the Government concession was announced. We are of course delighted that the Government have been converted to our point of view, if a little on the late side.

The Bill should not be retrospective. New clause 2 was not selected for debate, but we hope that the other place will reconsider the issue of retrospection.

Our new clause 5 deals with unconscionable delay. We hope that the Government will continue to consider, in another place and more generally, whether that new clause's wording would be of additional assistance to clarify matters further, given the bad experience that expert extradition lawyers have had.

We also hope that a de minimis provision will be inserted in the Bill in another place and, although new clause 7 was not selected for debate, that trivial matters will be excluded from the Bill.

New clause 9 deals with the referral of part 1 warrants to the Secretary of State. It is an important matter, and I can tell the Minister that, if necessary, we will press it to a vote. We have made it clear repeatedly that one of the Opposition's main objections to the new European arrest warrant machinery, and to the framework list that the Government have signed up to, is that many offences are listed that are not offences under UK law. Some, such as xenophobia and computer-related crime, are vague and undefined.

The prospect is that UK citizens could be arrested here, at the request of a foreign authority, and shipped off abroad. They would not have the right to ask a UK court to test the matter. That is especially important in connection with undefined and vague categories such as xenophobia, and catch-all categories such as computer-related crime.

New clause 9 would introduce the safeguard that the matter would have to be brought back to the Secretary of State, and that Parliament would receive an annual report. That would mean that there would be clear parliamentary scrutiny. My hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) made a well judged intervention on the Minister a few minutes ago when he made the point that the Labour-dominated Home Affairs Committee had called for just such a backstop. It is not good enough for the Minister to say that the new clause is not necessary and to ask how the Secretary of State would exercise the powers.

We in this House are familiar with legislation that give Secretaries of State backstop powers. Given what the present Home Secretary has said about judges—the right hon. Gentleman claims that they do not operate legislation in the way that he intended, and says that judges should take note of what Parliament intended—I should have thought that he of all people would recognise that he needs the long-stop that a reserve power represents. Opposition Members strongly believe that there should be a regular report to Parliament, so that the massive change that the Government are introducing can be checked on annually by Parliament.

Given the Home Secretary's very public anger about the way in which judges have stopped him doing what he wants, we hope that a scrutiny power for the Home Secretary will find favour. If the Minister is not empowered to say as much today, we hope that the debate in another place will force the Government to think again and give UK citizens the protection that they need.

I stress that it would be even better if all cases could be looked at by a UK court before a British citizen is extradited for something that is not a crime in UK law. That is especially important after some of the issues raised by the Pinochet case. The danger is that another state could seek the extradition of Ministers—in the current Government, or in past or future Governments—in the same way as a Spanish magistrate sought to extradite Pinochet. Ministers may need to consider that possibility in connection with the current action in Iraq, or in connection with other international decisions. Reference was made in Committee to the concern about decisions made with regard to the bombing in Kosovo. Some people outside the House said that the decision was not an appropriate one for Ministers to take.

The Minister must accept that the issue is serious. There is no doubt that it will be examined in another place. It cannot be dismissed.

New clause 19, tabled by the Liberal Democrats, offers another sort of safeguard in these matters. Although our new clause 6 was not selected for debate, the issue remains important. I am sure that many people in another place with senior experience in government or in the law will share our concerns. We understand what the Liberal Democrats are doing with new clause 19, and in general we share their concerns. New clause 19 could be a helpful further safeguard. In the future, if a far-left or fundamentalist Government were to take power in Turkey, say—if it was an EU member by then—or in Italy, and if that Government were to seek the extradition of the UK Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary of the day, Conservative Members would be able to say that we warned the Government that that could happen. They would be able to say that it was because the present Home Secretary failed to introduce a political reasons exception to this Bill, as recommended on Second Reading by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin). The Bill needs a reserve power so that a future Home Secretary can have a fall-back position that will allow him to decide that extradition is not appropriate in certain cases.

We do not agree with the list of offences to which the Government signed up in the framework decision, but we entirely understand the view put forward by the Chairman of the Select Committee, who is not able to be with us at present. He proposed an amendment that would have put the whole list on the face of the Bill. The Opposition might have proposed that ourselves if the list had been better, but our concern about the nature of some offences on the list means that that would not have been appropriate. However, the principle remains, and we shall come back to it in connection with a later group of amendments.

Government amendment No. 47 is a technical amendment on double jeopardy, as the Minister made clear. It mirrors clause 14 and takes account of the possibility that the conduct complained of may not constitute a criminal offence in the UK. The Minister has made it clear that the Government acknowledge that possibility.

Government amendments Nos. 49, 51, 52 and 74 represent a significant concession to the opinions expressed by us and by the Liberal Democrats in Committee, and by the Select Committee on Home Affairs, in relation to speciality waiver and re-extradition. We do not want other countries to able to assume that they have the UK's consent. I welcome the Government's concession, although it was clear from the Minister's letter to me that it was made somewhat reluctantly. I will not go so far as to say that it was made grudgingly, but it was not made as willingly as some of the others.

Amendment No. 5, to which I am delighted that the hon. Members for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett) and for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) have added their names, would reintroduce the protection for which the Home Affairs Committee also called—namely, that the offences covered in clause 63 should be only those carrying three years' imprisonment, not 12 months. I remind the Minister that the Labour-dominated Home Affairs Committee used very strong language about that. It said:

"In relation to the dual criminality requirement, we can see no justification for eroding the basic level of protection provided by the framework decision".

It went on to say:

"The framework decision requires the UK to do so only in relation to offences with a maximum penalty of at least 3 years and we are dismayed that the Home Office is seeking to do so".

Amendment No. 91, tabled by the Liberal Democrats, seeks to introduce an "injustice and oppression" safeguard. We do not disagree with that, although it may not go as far as our suggestion of a political reasons safeguard.

Although I have tried to be brief in summarising our responses to these matters and in speaking to our new clause, I should stress that my brevity does not suggest any lack of enthusiasm. These are important issues that will be taken seriously in another place, and I shall certainly want to press the new clause to division.

I have already said that we welcome the concession on speciality, and we also welcome the passage of time amendment tabled by the Government.

New clause 9 proposes important safeguards that we support. The Bill contains many offences that are not offences in the United Kingdom. We have not discussed swindling: if I bought a car from the Minister for £1,000 knowing that I could sell it to the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) for £2,000 and then did so, would I be swindling the Minister? Perhaps I would, but that is the basis on which business is done throughout this country. That might seem to be a facile example, but it goes to the core of the entire definition. These offences are nebulous and uncertain. We believe that there should be safeguards, so we support the new clause.

As I said in my intervention on the Minister, I support new clause 9 because it is very close to what the Home Affairs Committee recommended as a backstop power for the Home Secretary. One of the objections made to us was that it may be contrary to the European arrest warrant and therefore out of order. As a good European, will the hon. Gentleman reflect on that possibility and give his view?

In Committee, the Minister cursed his misfortune in having drawn the two most Eurosceptical Liberal Democrat Members—[Interruption.] I had better make that figure three, as my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) is here, although he did not serve on the Committee. I believe in a Europe of nation states—a partnership—and I do not want to see foisted on our judicial system matters that are nebulous, uncertain and unfair to our own people or to people abroad.

I am delighted that we have the support of Conservative Members on new clause 19. The second head of injustice and oppression is not new—it is taken directly from section 11(3)(b) of the Extradition Act 1989 and appeared in all earlier extradition legislation. The Bill has adopted the cause of injustice and oppression arising out of the passage of time, which I welcome, and has rejected the

"accusation not in good faith in the interests of justice"

test in section 11(3)(c) of the 1989 Act. I refer to the case of Saifi v. the governor of Brixton prison, which demonstrated that in the absence of a discretion for the Secretary of State to refuse extradition—that is, to act as a long stop to prevent injustice in exceptional cases—grave injustice may occur, which is not avoided by the application of the Human Rights Act 1998. In another case—the Murat Callis case, which was a Turkish case—the court discharged the accused on the ground that the accusations were not made in good faith in the interests of justice, but were made as a means of blackmail. While the principle of mutual recognition must be recognised in respect of category 1 countries that are party to the European Union, it does not fall to be recognised in respect of category 2 countries. The Minister said that he supports the underlying aims of the new clause. He does not, of course, believe that there should be injustice or oppression. As I said, however, it is no good the Minister falling back on human rights protections, because those are not available.

I want to say a few words about the change in the threshold from 12 months to three years proposed in amendment No. 5. The European arrest warrant removes the dual criminality requirement for 32 offences where those are punishable in the issuing state by a custodial sentence or detention order for a maximum period of at least three years. Clause 62(3)(c) reduces that to 12 months. The Government have provided no justification for the inroad into the protection offered at EU level. We should maintain the threshold at three years, which would reduce the risk of warrants being issued other than for the most serious offences in respect of which it has been decided that dual criminality is not required.

On amendment No. 91, a person's extradition to a category 2 territory is barred if it appears that because the accusation against him is not made in good faith in the interests of justice it would, having regard to all the circumstances, be unjust or oppressive to return him. That is an important principle, and the House should consider it so.

I rise to support the amendments tabled by my right hon. and hon. Friends, but also to defend the liberties of my constituents, as all hon. Members must do. I am concerned about the Bill, and I want particularly to address the European arrest warrant.

Although I would be the last person to want criminals from other countries to remain in the United Kingdom, and would prefer them to be punished in their native lands, I am concerned that the Government are not responding through the Bill to a genuine problem but are pandering to the wishes of Europe—not an uncommon occurrence with this Government, I —am sad to say. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the Bill's provisions relating to the European arrest warrant. They would allow for British citizens to be extradited to other European Union nations for crimes that are riot recognised in the United Kingdom, and with only limited UK legal hearings. It is particularly worrying that certain crimes in other European countries—especially those relating to so-called xenophobia and racism, and to computer-related crime—are exceptionally difficult to define and pinpoint accurately.

Surely it is unthinkable that any British Government should lay British citizens open to arrest for breaking laws that are not clearly definable. Were this Bill to be passed, an Englishman—or, of course, a Scotsman or a Welshman—who had perhaps done nothing wrong, or done anything that any right-thinking person in this country would condemn him for, or even anything that could be considered a criminal offence, could not feel secure in his own country.

Does the hon. Gentleman believe that, when an Englishman is, for example, in Germany, he should obey German law or English law while he is there?

Of course I believe that any person in any country should obey the laws of that country. I believe most strongly of all, however, that no British citizen should be subjected to the laws of other countries while they are in this country. That is completely wrong.

I agree with my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin), who, alongside the directors of the Democracy Movement and Liberty, presented a petition on this issue to Downing street in November. The Bill will achieve an increase in the bureaucracy involved in extradition, at the cost of proper checks. What it needs to do is to tackle the real criminals who are a serious danger to the British national interest and to catch and deal with terrorists while protecting the innocent from European pettiness.

The European arrest warrant represents an assault on civil liberties in the United Kingdom that will be potentially devastating for British people who fall victim unintentionally to committing ambiguous crimes abroad. It will open the floodgates for British citizens to suffer in foreign prisons and under foreign judicial systems that do not share our own standards and values. I urge hon. Members to reject it.

It is with great pleasure that I follow my hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Mr. Rosindell), who has made a powerful case about the dangers of removing the protection of dual criminality. I rise to speak specifically in support of new clause 9, which would put into law the recommendation of the Home Affairs Committee—I am pleased to see its Chairman in his place—to give a backstop power to the Home Secretary in cases in which extradition was being sought for something that was not a crime in this country.

The Minister asked, when 1 intervened on him, how the Home Secretary could be asked to designate a request as being "proper." That is the word in the new clause. I did not draft it, and I have to say that I prefer the Select Committee's carefully drafted recommendation about the backstop power. I will try to defend the proposal, however, and I want to make two points to the Minister. First, the Home Secretary has a role in extradition right now. He has to decide in many cases whether someone should be extradited, and whether it is proper to do so. All that we are saying is that, under the European arrest warrant, if a person were accused of something that was not a crime in this country, the Home Secretary should have a backstop power to say whether it was proper or not. Secondly, we are in new territory here. Never before have we given up the dual criminality protection, so why not give a backstop power to the Home Secretary?

The backstop power proposed in new clause 9 is important because I believe that we are making a great mistake in getting rid of the protection of dual criminality. I shall give a simple example, so that we all know where we stand. Let us say that one of our constituents goes off to Spain, then returns to the United Kingdom and is accused of committing an offence. Under the Bill, so long as the arrest warrant had been properly filled out, that person would be returned to Spain. At no time would it be asked whether the offence that he was alleged to have committed was a crime in this country.

I did not have the pleasure of serving on the Standing Committee for this Bill, but I know that the proponents of the European arrest warrant say that we must try to give them a good example of a case that would be affected in the way that I have described. Because we have the protection of dual criminality, I have to admit that it is difficult to point to a good case. Perhaps I can ask the Minister what he thinks of the point.

Other hon. Members have identified the problem of the very vague 32 categories, one of which is "racism and xenophobia". Not a lot of people know this—as Michael Caine might say—but in Finland, under the category of racism and xenophobia, warmongering is an offence. I shall share with the House what someone would have to do in Finland to be accused of warmongering. The Home Affairs Committee report states:

"It is an offence, if, during an ongoing or imminent military or international political crisis, for the purpose of causing Finland to be at war with the target of that military operation, to:

—publicly disseminate statements or other propaganda intended to turn the public opinion in favour of the carrying out of offensives".

Unless I have got it wrong, anyone who, for example, supports military action in the Gulf against Iraq and who travels to Finland and makes the case that the Finns—who, after all, may soon be part of a common European security and defence policy—should join the coalition, would be committing an offence. Suddenly, that could be something for which someone could be extradited. I would not recommend that either the Foreign Secretary or the Prime Minister should rush to visit Finland if they are going to talk about what is going on in the Gulf. I see the Minister laughing, and I admit that it is quite funny. I did not know that that was Finnish law until recently.

Will my hon. Friend consider this further possibility? Were someone in Finland to access the Downing street website and read the many arguments for war that it puts forward, it might be possible for an alert judge or prosecuting magistrate in Finland to extradite the Prime Minister for warmongering.

Absolutely. We have only to look at the Downing street website to see many statements in support of military action. They could be taken as an attempt to encourage the brave and plucky Finns to join us in the Gulf.

I observed that the Minister was laughing at that example, but the problem is that the Bill is removing dual criminality as a protection. It is an important safeguard that people in this country have had for years. All that our modest new clause 9 proposes is to give a backstop power to the Home Secretary. I am sure that in most cases he would say, "It is fine. The arrest warrant has been filled out, and it can go ahead. This is clearly an offence." However, we would give him a backstop power for cases in which there was no dual criminality, so that he could say, "Hold on a second. This should not happen."

Proponents of the European arrest warrant always ask why someone should be protected just because they have managed to cross a border. They have been in Germany, Spain or Portugal, so why should they suddenly have protection when they get back to good old Blighty? My answer would be that our legal system is here to protect our citizens, and that that protection should be given up only if we can really trust the legal systems of other states. It is one thing to do that, as we have done in extradition cases for many years, when a crime that we recognise has been committed. It is quite another thing to give up that protection if we do not recognise the crime. This whole question turns on whether we trust other member states' criminal justice systems.

3 pm

The case of the plane spotters in Greece has been mentioned several times. It is not directly relevant to the EU arrest warrant because they were arrested in Greece and did not make it back to the UK. However, it showed people in this country that one could be held in prison in Greece for weeks on end before even being charged, let alone tried. That is what shocked so many people in the UK: those people had not even been charged, yet they were languishing in a Greek jail.

My argument does not rely merely on one case, however. There are four vital objections to the removal of the protection of dual criminality. I shall deal with them briefly. First, we do not know for certain which offences will be covered by the EU arrest warrant. As I said earlier, the 32 categories include some extremely vague offences, such as xenophobia. We do not have a detailed definition of the offences that will fall into each of those categories in each member state. The Home Office told the Home Affairs Committee that it did not have detailed definitions of offences in the criminal justice systems of other EU member states. The Home Office cannot tell us for which specific offences we might be in danger of extradition.

Secondly, the 32 categories do not appear in the Bill. When the Select Committee asked the Home Office why that was so, the response was that article 2.2 of the framework decision allowed for the list to be amended. We have thus been told that new classes of offence and extra offences could be added without proper parliamentary scrutiny. We are certainly not discussing them today. As those new classes of vague offences are added, we will not know which crimes fall within them. The Government rejected the Committee's recommendation to import the list of 32 offences directly into the Bill. Their response stated only that, although they do not know of any plans to amend the list of 32 offences, they believe that they must retain the flexibility to deal with any such changes.

Do the Government want to amend the number of categories or not? The Select Committee's response to the Government was clear, and I could not agree more: the UK's domestic law should be clear in the future Act. Citizens should not have to refer to the EU document "sitting behind" the Bill in order to know what the law is. We should know about the laws that we are passing.

My third objection is that the situation is not static. Individual countries can add extra offences in each of the 32 categories—[Interruption.] I think that the Minister said "So can we". Even if he can tell us about every offence under each of the categories, including Finnish warmongering, he cannot reassure us that Governments will not create new offences in future. The protection of dual criminality would not exist for any of them.

My final objection is that countries joining the EU could automatically be designated category 1 countries and therefore be part of the European arrest warrant system. In fact, there is no restriction on any country being designated category 1—it does not have to be a member of the EU. The Government said that they do not intend to designate other countries as category 1, but they seem to be retaining that possibility. Their reason for rejecting the Select Committee's recommendation was that they required flexibility to be able to designate other countries as category 1, so there is no reassurance there.

Countries that join the EU or that become subject to the European arrest warrant can decide on their own interpretation of the 32 categories. They can decide which offences fall under them and add other offences in future.

In summary, what that means for our constituents is that getting rid of dual criminality is no small thing. The Minister is not saying, "Here is a small list of offences in a small number of countries. They will not change and all I ask is that you trust their criminal justice systems in those limited cases." He is not saying that at all. In effect, he is saying, "Here is a list of 32 vague categories of offence but I cannot tell you which crimes will be included in them, nor can I tell you which new categories will be added in future. I cannot tell you which new offences will be added to those categories and I cannot tell you what countries joining the EU in future will do". There are no guarantees whatever.

To put the matter in tabloid form, the Minister is not telling us to trust the current Greek, Portuguese or Spanish criminal justice systems. Instead, he is saying that we must trust any criminal justice system of any present or future EU country not as it is today but as it may be decades in the future.

That is why we need a safeguard. New clause 9 is modest, and I can see no objection to it. We are asking only that the Home Secretary be allowed to decide in cases in which the offence is not a crime in this country. We should give him that backstop power. Will the Minister explain what is wrong with that?

I can see only two possible objections. The first is that such a role is not appropriate for the Home Secretary—perhaps because he is too busy. I cannot believe that. Only a few cases would be involved. The Home Secretary should appoint another Minister to replace the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham). That would reduce the workload—[Interruption.] I am trying to help the Minister to have a fulfilling life. The Home Secretary has played a role in extradition for decades, so that cannot be an objection. As I said, there would be only a few cases in which people were subject to extradition for an alleged crime that is not an offence in this country.

The only other possible objection is the one that I raised with the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett). I now know that the hon. Gentleman is a good man as well as a good European, because he supports a Europe of nation states.

Independent nation states.

The hon. Gentleman gets better. Soon he will outflank me on the right.

The other objection relates to whether the provision would be allowable under the European arrest warrant. Will the Minister tell us what legal advice he has received on that?

The House should try to get the law right for this country. There certainly should be expeditious extradition arrangements between European countries but we should not get rid of fundamental protections. The House should include a backstop power for the Home Secretary in the Bill and then we should see what the European Court makes of it. We should not lie down meekly because Ministers signed things away in Europe without thinking them through and say that we have to go along with them with no further debate.

I hope that we shall divide on new clause 9 and that it will receive support from both sides of the House or, at the very least, from all the members of the Home Affairs Committee.

It is with great humility that I shall try to follow the masterly summary of the arguments given by my hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron). My hon. Friend the Member for Romford (Mr. Rosindell) also spoke passionately and well. I support in every particular the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins).

It would be foolish to pretend that the Bill is objectionable in every respect. I welcome some aspects of it, such as the speeding up of some of the procedures. The Minister heard a great deal in Committee about cases such as that of Rachid Ramda who was involved in the Paris metro bombing and succeeded in spinning out his case against extradition from the UK to France for seven years. It would be a very good thing if men like him were not able to monkey around with the judicial process for so long.

I want to focus on dual criminality, as my hon. Friends the Members for Witney and for Romford and other hon. Members have done. I can understand that we have something to gain and something to lose by getting rid of the principle of dual criminality in the case of European extradition warrants. We have heard that we would gain in cases where we wanted to extradite to this country someone who was guilty of something that we had made a crime in this country. but was not criminal conduct in another country where that person happened to be. Swindling, the age of consent and various other examples of how we might gain have been raised.

We would have something to lose, of course, and I want to range against each other two principles of law—mutual recognition and legal certainty. In my judgment, there is an overwhelming case for preserving legal certainty, not going down the route that the Minister constantly invites us to take, which he calls mutual recognition. There is a reason for that: this is not mutual recognition, properly so-called. I said that time and again in Committee until I was virtually blue in the face.

I had the great joy of spending five years in Brussels, reporting on the creation of the single European market, very largely brought about by Baroness Thatcher—it was in many ways a Conservative programme of extending the benefits of free trade and mutual recognition of standards and norms across the EU. Lord Cockfield, a former Conservative Cabinet Minister, who was the Commissioner responsible for the single market, pioneered the principle of mutual recognition, which is, of course, instantiated in the famous Cassis de Dijon case.

Under the principle of mutual recognition, if the Minister manufactures sausages that contain a red dye that is approved in his constituency, but not in Germany, or the Germans do not approve of the standard of sausages that he makes because they contain too much red dye, that sausage must be—

Extradited.

No, not extradited. That sausage must be legally bought and consumed in Germany. The rule of mutual recognition says that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, and if we in this country say that the sausage is perfectly good for us and perfectly good for the Minister and made him what he is—a fine figure of a Minister—there is no reason why the Germans should not eat it too. That is mutual recognition.

I want to tell the House in all candour that that principle can be very happily transferred to the criminal law. A moment or two's reflection will show why that is the case. It is possible throughout the Community to recognise two different types of sausage—the type that the Minister makes, in my hypothesis, and the type that the Germans want—so we could have German sausages and the Germans could have British sausages. There is a free movement of sausages—mutual recognition of sausages. It is not possible to bring that about in the criminal law.

It is not possible simultaneously to make it legal to drive on the right and on the left in all Community countries. The Minister will start to appreciate the point that I am making. It is not possible simultaneously to have a legal age of consent at 15 and at 18 in this country, and there are variations across the Community. Therefore, what we are talking about is not mutual recognition, as it has been generally understood in building the Community.

If anything, what we are trying to introduce by the European extradition warrant and the wrongful importing into the argument of the principle of mutual recognition is the assumption that, in any dispute between two criminal jurisdictions involving an argument about whether or not something is a crime, the higher standard will prevail; it will be assumed that that act is a crime for the purposes of extradition. That is not what is meant by mutual recognition. I am belabouring that point, and I mean to belabour it because I do not feel that it has been properly understood. I have tried to din it into the heads of Labour Members, but they have remained obstinately immune.

The hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I do not engage in a debate about sausages, but does he believe that, if the age of consent is 18 in another European country—to use the example he gave—and people from this country went there and committed an offence, they should not be eligible for extradition?

As I said in my opening remarks, I really think—I shall come to this point again in a minute—that we have something to gain and something to lose from such extradition. There will be things that we think are criminal, that are not recognised as crimes in other countries, for which we would like to extradite people to this country, and we will lose that opportunity.

It is a simple question, Boris.

My answer is no. I do not think that that involves mutual recognition. The House is being asked to agree that, in any dispute between two criminal jurisdictions, it should be assumed in deciding the matter of extradition that there is criminal conduct. It may be that the country in which the person currently resides says that the conduct is not criminal but, if there is a dispute, it will be assumed for the purposes of extradition that criminal conduct has taken place. That is something different from mutual recognition, and that fact should be recognised.

During the hon. Gentleman's five years of journalism in Brussels, did he obey Belgian law or English law? Is it not the height of arrogance for him to suggest—this is the conclusion of his argument—that people from this country who go abroad are bound by their native law, not by the law of that other country? In effect, that is what he is saying.

I am not going to take that criticism from the hon. Gentleman. Of course I obeyed Belgian law. As my hon. Friend the Member for Romford pointed out, we should obey the law of whichever Community country we happen to be in. Of course that is what we are saying, but we are also saying that when people are in Britain, they should have the legal certainty that the laws of this country, not those of another Community country, will apply to them. The whole point is that they will be vulnerable to extradition for things that are not crimes in this country. That is the point on which we differ.

It is perfectly clear that there is a list of 32 broad categories of offence. As my hon. Friend the Member for Witney pointed out, that list can be varied at will by the European Council on a majority vote. There is no way that we can possibly influence the changes made to those categories of crime or, indeed, to the criminal justice systems of other countries, so we are giving up our democratic right to make the law of this country.

To clarify the situation, the list can only be changed by unanimity. What we cannot do, however, is prevent the Belgians from changing Belgian law, or the French from changing French, law first as we will not allow them to prevent us from changing British law. If we changed British law, would we not expect people in our country to obey our new law?

I am grateful to the Minister for clearing up the point about unanimity and majority voting, and I am sorry to have got that wrong just now. He makes the point well that it is up to the Belgians to vary their own criminal justice system. We will have absolutely no influence over that. The net result will be that a citizen in this country can be extradited to Belgium or to another category 1 country to face charges for something that is not a crime in this country. In my view, that is taking away the legal certainty of people whom we represent and the freedoms of people whom we were elected to serve. It is rash of us to do that, particularly when we consider how deeply at variance we currently are about one aspect of international law: we cannot agree with the French about the legal status of the action that we are taking in Iraq. There is a huge difference of opinion about the legality of that most vital international operation. How, therefore, can we expect to have consensus and harmony about a great host of minor matters, and how can we possibly expect our citizens to have any certainty about what laws apply to them as they move around the country?

The hon. Gentleman is in danger of misrepresenting the case by almost suggesting—I know that he did not intend to say this—that a citizen of this country who has never set foot outside it will somehow be subject to extradition because he has broken a law in Britain that applies in another country. That is of course not the case. Citizens of Britain who go abroad are subject to the laws of that realm, and if they commit a crime in that country, irrespective of whether it is a crime in this country, they must surely be held accountable in the country that they have freely chosen to visit. Surely that is a fundamental point.

Of course such people must be held to account, and I am not opposed to their being held to account for crimes that they may have committed in foreign countries. Of course we must respect the legal systems of other Community countries. I am simply saying that when we think that there is no crime under our laws, it should be possible for the Home Secretary—a democratically elected representative of our people—to decide that there is no case for immediate extradition. The European extradition law means immediate extradition, with no argument and no discussion. All that the Opposition are suggesting is that that very small safeguard should be built into the Bill. That seems not much to ask.

The hon. Gentleman is making a powerful point, with which I have considerable sympathy. As he knows, dual criminality is abolished for category 1 countries. For example, someone who might have broken a swindling law in another category 1 country might be completely oblivious of the fact that he has broken any law whatever and would consider himself entirely innocent. Does the Gentleman agree that in those circumstances there must be some safeguards and there should not be immediate extradition?

I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who advances ever further in the hierarchy of soundness and common sense. It is miraculous what common sense Liberal Democrats in the west country show when they are up against Conservatives.

To return to the previous intervention from the hon. Member for Glasgow, Cathcart (Mr. Harris), I am in favour of us all obeying the laws of other Community countries and taking the consequences when we get home, provided that there is dual criminality. The Gentleman should bear in mind, however, that under the Bill, as he suggests, someone might be sitting in their front room doing something on a computer—as that is envisaged in the text of the Bill—and, as I read it, it is not outside the bounds of possibility that they could be extradited without having even set foot in a foreign country. The possibility that he raises as a reductio ad absurdam is therefore not as absurdam as he suggests.

Finally, I want to revert to the case of the Kalamata plane spotters, as the last time I did so I said that it would have been awful had they come back to Britain and been extradited on the spot. I think the Minister stood up and said, "Ha, ha! They could already be extradited, even without this extradition warrant Bill, because they were arrested under charges of espionage, and they would have had to go back." It was a good point. As I was able to say to him then, however, and as I shamelessly repeat now, the point is that under the current law the Home Secretary can decide whether to vary that warrant. It would be a small protection for our citizens to give the democratically elected Home Secretary the ultimate power to decide whether an extradition request from a European country was vexatious or improper. It is not beyond the imaginative powers of the Minister to understand how the Home Secretary, who is a very capable and intelligent man—unless the Minister is trying to tell me otherwise—could decide whether an extradition warrant was proper or not. He would simply decide whether the case had been well made and whether there was a case to answer, even if he could see no dual criminality, and then sign the case off. Installing such a small protection for the people whom we represent is the very least that we can ask of the Government.

I do not understand why the Minister does not do that because I can imagine the headlines that will be written after the provision bites. There will come a time when he will be recognised as the author of this sad legislation. I can imagine his future embarrassment and what certain tabloid newspapers will do to him. I could write the headlines for him—maybe I will. If he has any power of reflection, I urge him to think twice and accept the amendment.

It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson), not least because my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Walton (Mr. Kilfoyle) tells me that the hon. Gentleman has an iconic status among the young people of Liverpool. I am not entirely sure how that has arisen, but no doubt I shall gain some brownie points from my hon. Friend for speaking against the hon. Gentleman.

I listened carefully to the hon. Gentleman and, to put it kindly, the logic of his argument was muddled. He seemed to advance the theory that extradition should be right and permissible only when the offence that is committed in one country is roughly the same as an offence under our criminal law, which I assume he would concede to be the principle of dual criminality. I think that that was the burden of his argument, although he might wish to correct me because he was somewhat muddled and I might have misunderstood him.

I found it rather shocking that the hon. Gentleman made that argument, and I have two problems with it. I think that he believes that nation states have the right to decide what is right and appropriate for them. I presume that his time spent as a journalist in Brussels reinforced that view because I have heard him advance the argument in the past. If he accepts that any nation state, whether in the EU or not, has the right to make such decisions, it follows that any visitor to a nation state is bound by its law and that any visitor who commits an offence there yet manages to get home should expect to be extradited back to that country to face the music. I have no problem with the logic of that and I do not know why the hon. Gentleman, who is a great defender of nation states, cannot understand why that must be the case.

rose—

rose—

I shall give way to the hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) and then the hon. Member for Henley.

Surely the logic of the hon. Gentleman's argument is that we should remove the protection of dual criminality not only from EU states, but from states throughout the world.

No. The omission that the hon. Gentleman makes in raising that point is that all other EU states, and even to some degree the applicant countries, recognise that there is already a framework setting down some minimum standards. So, there is a distinct difference. For argument's sake, I would not say that that would be so in all countries in the world, because clearly there are some places where criminal law is not as sophisticated as that in most European states and ours.

rose—

I will not give way to the hon. Gentleman again, because I said that I would give way to the hon. Member for Henley.

I am not, of course, saying that people should not be extradited except where dual criminality applies. No one on the Conservative Benches is saying that. The hon. Gentleman grossly misrepresents my argument. All we are saying is that when dual criminality does not apply, the Home Secretary should have the power to decide whether to go ahead with the extradition. I thought that I had made that abundantly clear.

The hon. Gentleman's indignation overtook my ability to make my second point, which was indeed to talk about the Home Secretary's role. I happen to have been a junior Minister at the Home Office when my right hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw), as Home Secretary, had to study and make a decision on the Pinochet case. I shall not go into all the rights and wrongs of that, but I will make a couple of observations about the process.

First, a cordon sanitaire had to be built around my right hon. Friend because it was properly recognised by officials that he could not be easily influenced by anything else going on and that he had to concentrate uniquely and almost single-mindedly on the arguments for the application for extradition and their merits or otherwise. Secondly—

rose—

If the hon. Gentleman will let me finish my point, I will allow him to intervene.

Secondly, although I had no direct or even indirect involvement in the Pinochet case, I know that my right hon. Friend had to concentrate on the legal arguments that both sides put before him. He was not acting as some superimposed arbiter of right and wrong, but deciding on the legal arguments which, in almost any other circumstance, would have fallen to a judge.

The right hon. Member for Blackburn (Mr. Straw) was in a difficult position because as a youth he had been out demonstrating against Mr. Pinochet. As far as I can remember, that was the particular difficulty that beset him. It is hard to imagine similar difficulties affecting future Home Secretaries in making such decisions. I therefore do not see why the hon. Gentleman's point invalidates the general desirability of a Home Secretary making such a final, safety, backstop judgment on whether extradition should go ahead.

The hon. Gentleman's point applies not only to my right hon. Friend but to almost all politicians. The truth is—and the hon. Gentleman is no exception to this rule—we all have form. Every one of us in pursuit of our political careers has taken positions on all sorts of things. If the hon. Gentleman ever found himself in a position such as the one I have described, he too would have form—not necessarily on Pinochet, but he will have made pronouncements not only in his political life but during his career in journalism. That is why it is far better for such things to be decided by judges than by those of us who find ourselves in political positions that on occasions may have quasi-judicial implications. The hon. Gentleman has not made a strong case. All the arguments go in the opposite direction, and I certainly shall not be voting for the Opposition amendments.

Where do I start? I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth) for trying to help me bring a little clarity and logic to the debate, although that is pretty difficult.

Let us try to unravel some of the jumbling that has gone on since the Conservative Back Benchers, joined by the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett), took over the debate. The hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon complained about the list, and someone not knowing whether or not he was committing an offence. I understand that the Gentleman is a lawyer. If he is seriously telling the House that ignorance of the law is a reason for rendering one immune to prosecution, he should stand up and say so, otherwise he should not have come to the House and spoken about someone not knowing they had committed an offence.

Of course, I recognise and acknowledge that ignorance of the law is not a defence against a charge. Having said that, if someone commits an offence overseas which he believes is not an offence—he believes that it is an entirely innocent—act and is then subject to extradition, surely there must be some safeguards.

So if a German, for example, comes to our country, breaks our law, returns to Germany and says, "But wait a minute, I didn't know I was breaking the law," he should not be sent back here to face justice.

rose—

No, I am not going to give way to the hon. Gentleman again.

That is exactly what the hon. Gentleman is saying—there must be a safeguard that prevents that man from being returned. His ignorance of the fact that he was breaking the law ought to provide him with protection from prosecution.

The whole point, as the Minister well knows, is that ignorance of the law of one's own country is not a defence—that is indisputable. However, let us suppose that a fine, influential, upstanding Home Office Minister went to Finland and made a speech defending the behaviour of the coalition forces in the war, argued that there were good reasons for supporting military action in the Gulf, then went back to London thinking that he had done a good job, only to find that he was guilty of breaching the Finnish law on warmongering, would that Minister he wholly innocent or not on the ground that he did not know—and I bet that the Minister does not know, but perhaps he will correct me—that warmongering is an offence in Finland?

Let me try to deal with the issues that have been raised.

rose—

l shall not accept interventions for the moment, but of course I will allow hon. Members to intervene later.

We have heard numerous contradictions, including many in the speech of the hon. Member for Henley (Mr. Johnson). He said that if the age at which someone could be prosecuted as a criminal in this country was different from that in another country they should not be sent back. However, only a couple of sentences later, he agreed that when he was in Belgium he abided by Belgian law. He cannot have it all ways. The hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron) spoke about somebody who had committed an offence in Spain and returned to this country. That person could be extradited and, during that process, at no time would it be asked whether or not what he had done was an offence in that country.

No, I did not say that.

Wait a minute, that is what the hon. Gentleman said. If he wants to check the record, he can do so, as that is clearly what he said. I do not know whether he spoke in error.

rose—

I urge the hon. Gentleman to sit down, as I am not going to give way to him. That is what he said. If he said it in error, I accept that, but he did say it.

That idea is being bandied around in Conservative circles, and people are beginning to believe their own propaganda. There is nothing whatsoever in the Bill that says that people can be extradited for activities in this country that are not an offence here. I wish that hon. Members would stop making that allegation because it is not true. The Bill includes a requirement that provides the legal certainty that the hon. Member for Henley asked for. The Bill contains a requirement that whether or not somebody crosses a border, people must abide by the law of the country within which they are. That applies to people who come to our country as it applies to UK citizens who go abroad. If a German, a Frenchman or a Spaniard comes to our country and breaks our—

Will the Minister give way?

Hold on for a moment.

If that person comes to our country and breaks our law, he or she would be punished under our law while present in this country. In my view, there is no reason why they should be able to jump on a Eurostar train and for things to change all of a sudden when they get half way through the tunnel, with the result that they are not as vulnerable to being punished under our law—

Will the Minister give way?

I will give way to the hon. Gentleman and then I will give way to the hon. Member for Witney.

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way.

I think that the point that he is missing—my hon. Friends the Members for Witney (Mr. Cameron) and for Henley (Mr. Johnson) have been trying to get it over to him—is that one of the real mischiefs in the Bill is the vagueness of the categories of offence. The Minister must understand that one of the reasons for our concern, which is shared by the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett), is that if there are vague categories that will lead to British citizens being vulnerable, that is a concern and a particular reason why there should be a modest longstop, as a Labour dominated Home Affairs Committee suggested.

I do not know how many more times the hon. Gentleman will say "a Labour-dominated Home Affairs Committee". It is a good phrase of his own. I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention because it brings me directly to the point that I want to make. He keeps saying, in the hope that it will become true, that people will be subjected to vague categories of crime. They will not.

Will the Minister give way?

Hold on for a moment.

The warrant that requires the arrest will be clear. It will spell out the offence that has been committed as defined in the law of the jurisdiction in which the person was when they are alleged to have committed the offence. It will not use vague terminology. It will use a clear and specific allegation in French law, Spanish law or German law, stating that "this person is accused and wanted to stand trial for this offence."

rose—

Before I give way to the hon. Gentleman, I would say that we have offences that are not recognised in other European countries. The offence in this country of incitement to racial hatred is not an offence in many other European countries. Another example is the offence of fraudulent trading. If hon. Gentlemen are saying that we should not be allowed to seek extradition for people who have broken our clear law—not a generic list, not a vague definition but our offence of fraudulent trading—because they happen to be in France or in Belgium, please let them say so and give us the reasons for so doing.

I want to clarify the point. The Minister was misrepresenting what I said entirely. I hope that he will give me some credit. I sit on the Home Affairs Committee and with others I spent hours producing its report. I was making the point about a constituent who went off to Spain and allegedly committed a crime in Spain. When the arrest warrant is filled out, at no time will it be asked whether the offence is an offence in this country. That is the simple point that I was making. I cannot think how the Minister can take issue with it. It is up to him to prove the case. He is the one who is taking away a safeguard that has been in the law of this country for decades. It is up to him to make his case.

I take issue with the hon. Gentleman because that is not what he said.

That is what I said.

It is not what the hon. Gentleman said. If I am wrong, I will apologise. We shall have a look at the record if that is what we need to do. I am not trying to disparage the hon. Gentleman.

Let us say he says what he says he said. At no time will it be necessary to prove that the offence that was committed is an offence in this country. The accused was in Spain and committed an offence there, and the warrant will define the offence in Spanish law. What is the matter with that? Effectively, the hon. Gentleman is saying that while his constituent was in Spain, he should have been prepared to abide not by Spanish law, but by English law, and that the warrant should take account of whether the offence was an offence in English law. The person in question was not in England when he committed the offence, but in Spain. The warrant will spell out not some vague category of crime, but a specific crime in Spanish law committed in Spain. If the threshold for extradition is exceeded, yes, that person will be extraditable.

I see no problem with that arrangement and believe that it is positive. After crimes are committed in Spain, there will be Spanish victims who are entitled to justice. When crimes are committed by other European citizens in our country, British citizens will be entitled to justice, so I see no problem with mutual recognition. I believe that it is the way forward and the direction that we need to take.

The hon. Member for Witney asked about the position of the Prime Minister, Ministers, diplomats and all the rest of it. The Bill contains absolutely nothing that changes the position on diplomatic or state immunity, so those who currently enjoy such immunities will continue to do so under the European arrest warrant arrangements.

I have dealt with the main point of contention in this discussion, but in order to bring a lighter note to the debate, I should like to respond to the threat of the hon. Member for Surrey Heath that some fundamentalist or left-wing Government in Turkey might use the European arrest warrant to arrest me or another member of the Government and that, in that event, he would be here to say "I told you so." I do not know whether that is an indication of his confidence that he will be sitting on the Opposition Benches for many a long year to come, but I certainly hope so.

The measure has been widely misrepresented. The generic list of offences is a mechanism by which mutual recognition is facilitated. Nobody will be extradited from one European country to another for anything other than an allegation of a clear breach of law in the other country, and hon. Gentlemen should not seek to suggest otherwise.

I thank the Minister for again giving way. He is laying a great deal of stress on the suggestion that certain things will be made absolutely clear in the warrants if the measure becomes law, but I ask him to address the question asked by the Opposition and by the Chairman of the Select Committee on Home Affairs from his own Back Benches. The Government have refused to include in the Bill the format of the arrest warrants or to accept what the Home Affairs Committee has said about including the list of very vague offences. I do not see how he can say at the Dispatch Box that he is confident about how the system will work unless he is prepared to include all the details in the Bill, as we have urged him to do.

I think I have said that it is extremely clear that the warrant will have to say exactly what the offence is, who issued it and whether they were an appropriate authority to do so—the Bill states that that authority will have to be a judicial authority—and that it meets the threshold in an accusation case that is required to allow extradition to be considered. If any of that information is not complete to the satisfaction of the National Criminal Intelligence Service in England or the Crown Office in Scotland, the warrant will not go forward and the case will not even be considered.

Let me deal with the reasons for not including a minimal safeguard at the back of the Bill. We cannot do that without opening up the issue of dual criminality and the playground to which it would lead on every single case. We cannot use the backstop of the Home Secretary without any decision that he makes being open to challenge and judicial review, yet the hon. Member for Henley claims that he wants a speedier system. He says that he does not want the sort of delays that occur in our current system, but tries to reintroduce provisions that allow the sometimes appalling delays under existing legislation. The Bill is designed to avoid them.

We are beginning to tease an important point out of the Minister. Many hon. Members would like a clear exposition of what, in the Minister's view, a warrant will contain. Will it spell out the exact offence under legislation in the countries that seek extradition? What else will the warrant include?

We discussed that at some length and I talked about the matter again when introducing this group of amendments. I do not know whether the hon. Gentleman has been able to sit through our proceedings this afternoon. The warrant will clearly state that people are sought in order to bring them to trial, give details of the law that has been allegedly broken in the jurisdiction and set out the potential penalty for breaking it. It will not refer to the generic list, which facilitates mutual recognition. The warrant will contain specific allegations. I refer the hon. Gentleman to clause 2(4) and (6). It sets out the exact requirements on the face of the warrant.

There is therefore certainty. The hon. Member for Witney asked what I would say to my constituents. I tell them that when people from another jurisdiction come to our country, they should be subject to our law. The fact that they manage to leave the country should not render them immune to it. However, the reverse applies to our constituents. When they go abroad, they must be prepared to abide by the law of the European country that they visit. Yes, those jurisdictions can change their laws, just as we can change ours. We require people to abide by the law as it stands at the time of the alleged offence.

The Minister gave the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett) an interesting answer. Surely, in the overwhelming majority of cases, a direct congruence between the offence in the other Community country and that in our law is immediately obvious. There will be genuinely no dual criminality in only a tiny minority of cases. Is it not sensible to leave those cases to the Home Secretary, acting as a longstop and a safeguard?

It is true that there is not an exact equivalent of an offence in British law in only a few cases. However, does the hon. Gentleman seriously suggest that that stops people raising the matter in every case and requiring arguments for the exact equivalent in British law? Does he not realise that that is one of the main causes of the delays in our current system?

For the benefit of the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon, let me read clause 2(4). It provides for the information that the warrant will contain. It is

"particulars of the person's identity; … particulars of any other warrant issued in the category I territory … particulars of the circumstances in which the person is alleged to have committed the offence, including the conduct alleged to constitute the offence and the time and the place at which he is alleged to have committed the offence; … particulars of the sentence which may be imposed under the law of the category 1 territory in respect of the offence if the person is convicted of it."

Subsection (6) says that the information is

"particulars of the person's identity … particulars of the conviction … particulars of any other warrant issued in the category 1 territory … particulars of the sentence which may be imposed under the law of the category 1 territory in respect of the offence … particulars of the sentence which has been imposed under the law of the category 1 territory in respect of the offence".

If the warrant does not contain those particulars, the extradition will not proceed. That has nothing to do with any vague list; a specific offence must have been committed in a category 1 country, and must be stated in the warrant.

The style of the European arrest warrant is given on page 47 of the Home Affairs Committee's report, which will tell the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett) all that he needs to know. It is clear what the warrant will look like. What is less clear is the nature of some of the 32 categories, such as racism and xenophobia. I gave an example involving Finnish warmongering, supplied to the Home Affairs Committee by Home Office officials.

Will the Minister give an undertaking that in years to come the Home Office will give the Home Affairs Committee and the House some guidance on laws in other countries relating to vague categories such as racism and xenophobia, so that we can at least help constituents who may get into trouble as a result of the new procedure?

As the hon. Member for Surrey Heath pointed out, we could attempt to trawl every jurisdiction for every piece of legislation that hits the threshold for extradition, but the Spanish, the Portuguese or the Italians might change their laws, as we might change ours. There is nothing to stop them doing that. The principle is that when we are in their jurisdictions, we are obliged to abide by the laws of those jurisdictions, just as they are obliged to abide by ours. I see nothing wrong with that.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Government amendments Nos. 38 and 39.

Amendment No. 19, in page 3, line 10 [Clause 3], after second 'person', insert 'of British nationality, sworn to serve only the Crown, and'.

Government amendments Nos. 40 to 42, 57, 58, 60, 61, 75, 78, 79, 81 and 82.

In its current form, the Bill provides that a European arrest warrant can be executed in this country by a police officer or designated appropriate person. That formulation already exists in legislation, but as an added safeguard—in contrast to what the Conservatives did in government—we have provided that designation orders should be subject to the affirmative resolution procedure.

It has been said that the use of the phrase "appropriate persons" was a means whereby we sought to disguise our wish to include foreign police officers in the powers applied in this country. Both my right hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham) and I stated that the term "appropriate person" was intended to cover Customs and Excise officers, service police officers and, possibly, other UK law enforcement agencies.

Our new clause and amendments are intended to make things absolutely clear, in black and white. Presumably all Members will now accept what was the Government's intention from the start—that the powers apply to police constables, customs officers and members of other police services of our country, and not to foreign police or customs officers.

I ask the Minister to clarify one point. After the Patten reforms, the number of police officers in Northern Ireland dropped dramatically, so the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland—and, indeed, the Policing Board—are very keen to recruit police officers through secondment and lateral entry. That may well include members of the police service of the Republic of Ireland—the Garda Siochana. It would be very helpful if the Minister could confirm whether those constables, if they should come, will have the power to execute an extradition warrant?

I am not familiar with all the details of the Northern Ireland jurisdiction, but I was coming to the amendment in the name of the Leader of the Opposition, and in doing so I should be able to clarify the point.

I assume that the amendment seeks to achieve what we now propose to achieve, but under it no one other than a British citizen would be able to execute a European arrest warrant. Under the terms of various laws governing the police in the United Kingdom—notjust in Northern Ireland—any British citizen, a citizen of the Irish Republic or a Commonwealth citizen may serve in our police force. It is not our intention to make such people second-class members of those police forces, and our amendment would not have that effect. They will be members of the British police force, and they will be able to issue extradition arrest warrants in the same way as they can issue domestic ones.

I hope that new clause 11 fits with the true intention of the hon. Member for Surrey Heath, who did not want to go further by ruling out people from Commonwealth or Republic of Ireland backgrounds who were serving in the British police force. Our provision will not rule them out, but his would have done so, and I hope that he can accept our solution.

I can deal with this group of amendments fairly quickly. As the Minister said, the important issue is Government new clause 16 and the linked Government amendments: Nos. 38 to 42, 57, 58, 60, 61, 75, 78, 79, 81 and 82. As the Minister has made clear, the Government have made a significant concession in the light of our comments, supported by the Liberal Democrats, in Committee. That also reflects the very strong view of the Home Affairs Committee that the Government's original proposal—that "an appropriate person" should execute a European arrest warrant—was too wide. As the Minister said, he sought to reassure us in Committee, but we wanted the Bill to make the position absolutely clear. I am therefore very pleased that we succeeded in persuading the Minister and his advisers that it would be sensible to put it beyond doubt that only police officers, constables, armed forces' police and Customs and Excise personnel can execute a European arrest warrant.

Although we welcome the Government's provision, I should mention in passing that we have some remaining concerns about the exact role to be undertaken by Customs and Excise in the light, as the Minister will be aware, of the collapse of recent cases involving Customs and Excise on such matters as bonded warehouses. The Minister is aware of issues that have been raised recently in this Chamber, and of the fact that there is an ongoing inquiry into the collapse of those cases. [Interruption.] The Gentleman nodded when I first raised this point, and, helpfully, he does so again. I hope that he will continue to keep the matter under review, because in our view there is much need for care if greater powers are to be used by Customs and Excise officials, given the very strong views expressed by the judge when those cases collapsed. We will continue to scrutinise this issue, and in our view reforms may well be required. This House will have another opportunity to debate this issue when the independent reports on the collapsed trials are received. [Interruption.] It is again very helpful to note the Minister's assent.

The Minister referred briefly to the fact that amendment No. 19 seeks to bring in a requirement to a similar effect. However, as he rightly pointed out, we tabled our amendment before the Government tabled theirs. We were seeking to move in the same direction, and I understand the Minister's point about problems in cases, for example, in which someone from the Commonwealth is already serving in our police force. The Minister was kind enough to recognise that we were aiming at the same target and his amendments fulfil our request in Committee. I welcome that, with the proviso that I have mentioned.

I do not want to go over ground that the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) has already covered. I welcome these sensible amendments, which were supported by the official Opposition, Liberal Democrats and the Home Affairs Committee. On the matter of customs and the bonded warehouse cases, the Treasury has experienced a massive loss of revenue, and it is no bad thing that customs prosecutions will now come under the aegis of the Attorney-General's Department.

Customs will have only those powers within its remit to issue European arrest warrants. I can also confirm for the hon. Member for North Down (Lady Hermon) that if the individuals whom she mentioned have the powers of a constable while they are serving in the Police Service of Northern Ireland, they will also have the powers to use the European arrest warrant in the same way as other constables in that service.

I am pleased that the Opposition are willing to withdraw their amendment on that issue. The problem is not only the nationality issue, but the words that were used in amendment No. 19—

"sworn to serve only the Crown".

That would not reflect the new oath taken by new members of the Police Service of Northern Ireland, so it would effectively disqualify new members of the service from executing extradition warrants, no matter what nationality they were.

In the interests of cross-party cooperation, I can confirm on behalf of the hon. Member for Surrey Heath that that was not h is intention. He was trying to achieve what the Government amendment will achieve and he is satisfied with our proposal—in this regard, if not in others.

I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.

With this it will be convenient to discuss the following:

Amendment No. 89, in page 1 [Clause 1], leave out line 6 and insert

'of the European Union that have abolished the death penalty in all circumstances'.

Amendment No. 16, in page 1, line 7 [Clause 1], leave out from `to' to end of line 8 and insert,

'territories that are party to the European Convention on Human Rights'.

Amendment No. 90, in page 1, line 7 [Clause 1], leave out from second 'territories' to end of line 8 and insert

'of the European Union that have abolished the death penalty in all circumstances'.

Amendment No. 24, in page 1, line 8 [Clause 1], at end add—

'(3) A territory may not be designated for the purposes of this Part unless that territory is—

(a) a signatory to the European framework decision, or

(b) a signatory to the convention implementing the Schengen agreement.'.

Government amendment Nos. 34, 46 and 48.

Amendment No. 1, in page 30, line 34 [Clause 63], leave out

'falls within the European framework list'

and insert

'constitutes terrorism'.

Amendment No. 2, in page 32, line 19 [Clause 64], leave out

'falls within the European framework list'

and insert

'constitutes terrorism'.

Amendment No. 3, in page 33 [Clause 65], leave out lines 45 and 46.

Amendment No. 25, in page 33, line 45 [Clause 65], leave out

'article 2.2 of the European framework decision'

and insert

'Schedule (European Framework List)'.

Amendment No. 26, in page 33, line 46 [Clause 65], at end insert—

'(3A) Schedule (European Framework List) (which is the list of conduct referred to in subsection (3) above) shall have effect.'.

Amendment No. 27, in page 33, line 46 [Clause 65], at end insert—

'(3B) The Secretary of State may by order amend the list of conduct set out in Schedule (European Framework List), but only in so far as is necessary to incorporate any extensions or amendments made to article 2.2 of the European framework decision by the Council of the European Union.'.

Amendment No. 28, in page 34, line 34 [Clause 68], at end add—

'(3) A territory may not be designated for the purposes of this Part unless that territory is—

(a) a territory with which the United Kingdom has entered into a bilateral treaty governing extradition arrangements as between the United Kingdom and that territory, or

(b) a territory with which the United Kingdom has entered into a multilateral treaty governing extradition arrangements as between the United Kingdom, that territory and one or more other territories.'.

Amendment No. 29, in page 107, line 42 [Clause 198], at end insert—

'(6A) The convention implementing the Schengen agreement is the convention made on 19 June 1990 implementing the Schengen agreement of 14 June 1985 between the governments of the states of the Benelux Economic Union, the Federal Republic of Germany and the French Republic on the gradual abolition of checks at their common borders (OJL239, 22.09.2000, p.19).'.

Amendment No. 30, in page 109, line 5 [Clause 204], after '5(2),', insert '65(3B)'.

Amendment No. 31, in page 109, line 6 [Clause 204], after `5(2),', insert '65(3B)'.

New schedule 1—'SCHEDULE—

Section 65

This is the biggest issue in the Bill for us, and I make it clear to the Minister that we intend to divide the House on it. As my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin) said on Second Reading, if part 1 applied only to terrorist offences we could, albeit in some ways reluctantly, accept it, because the unique threat of terrorism in our view alone justifies the draconian measures that the Government have proposed. The link between new clause 1 and amendments Nos. 1 and 2 would do that. Amendment No. 3 returns to the issue of the framework list, which we have already debated today. Amendment No. 16 refers back to the question of which countries have signed up to the ECHR.

In their amendments Nos. 89 and 90, the Liberal Democrats seek to take out countries that have the death penalty. In this House, the death penalty is a free-vote issue, on which hon. Memberscan express their personal views. I shall not detain the House on the matter this afternoon. I expressed my view in Committee, and I refer hon. Members to that.

Several hon. Members in Standing Committee expressed the concern that, if it turned out that the Liberal Democrat amendments opened up a further loophole in respect of other countries that have retained the death penalty, people who should be extradited for very serious offences should not continue to be a burden on the British taxpayer by remaining in our prisons. In addition, Conservative Members understand entirely the reasoning of the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin). I am pleased to see him in his place, as he has tabled amendments 25 to 31, and new schedule 1, in association with Liberal Democrat Members. The proposals would put the whole of the European framework list of offences on the face of the Bill. They would also include in the Bill a reference to Schengen.

We believe that what those amendments propose would be better than having no parliamentary scrutiny at all. As I explained, however, Conservative Members have not followed the route chosen by Liberal Democrat Members and the hon. Member for Sunderland, South. We do not agree with the framework list of offences. Many organisations outside the House do not agree with it. They include, on the left of politics, organisations such as Justice, and Liberty. Opponents on the right of politics include the Freedom Association, and the Democracy Movement.

We believe that many of the offences in the framework list are far too vague and undefined. I made that point in the debate on the last-but-one group of amendments, and I shall not waste the House's time by staging a reprise. However, the Liberal Democrats have not added their names to amendment No. 24, tabled by the hon. Member for Sunderland, South. Doubtless, the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett) will say why he does not support that amendment.

Finally, Government amendments Nos. 34, 36 and 48 also deal with the death penalty and put on the face of the Bill what the Home Affairs Committee wanted. EU member states Norway and Iceland are the only countries that the Government have said that they intend to designate. Neither of those countries retains the death penalty, so there is no difference in practice.

Before I end this brief contribution, I want to adopt everything that my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset said on Second Reading. He noted that this part of the Bill was justified only in respect of terrorist offences. He said that the very draconian measures in part 1 were not needed, given that part 2 will do so much to speed up extradition proceedings. The sole exception is terrorism. I am sure that all hon. Members will agree—especially in the current international situation, which concentrates all our minds—that terrorism poses a unique threat.

It is for the Government to justify the huge change that they are making. We feel that, despite the many hours in Committee and the warning that they received on Second Reading, the Government have signally failed to justify the change. That is why we intend to divide the House on what is a central matter in the Bill. It is undoubtedly a matter that will concern those in another place, as well as hon. Members in the Chamber this afternoon.

I shall not follow the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) in speaking about new clause 1. I wish to speak to amendments Nos. 24, 28 and 29, which are in my name. I thank the Government for their amendments Nos. 34, 46 and 48, which prevent any countries that retain the death penalty from becoming category 1 countries, to which fast-track extradition could apply. That removes one of the Select Committee's major areas of concern.

Apart from the proposals in connection with countries' retention of the death penalty, however, the Bill does not define which territories should fall into the two categories. It lays down no guidelines or principles governing the choice. Apart from the belated exclusion of the death penalty countries, the Bill contains no limits on which countries the Government can, by Order in Council, designate either as category 11 or as category 2 countries. Which countries appear in which categories, and on what basis a category country could be promoted to category 1, seemed to the Select Committee to be issues that are absolutely fundamental to the Bill. Future Orders in Council could dramatically change what Parliament understood to be the intention of the Bill at the time of enactment. We believe that Parliament should know clearly what policy and what principles it is being asked to agree, and we have therefore attempted to lay down some limits to the powers that Ministers are seeking for themselves.

4.15 pm

Amendment No. 24 would insert in clause 1 a provision that only countries that are signatories to the framework agreement may be category l countries—in effect, that means only EU states plus the Schengen countries, Norway and Iceland. Since we have been assured that those are the only countries that the Government intend to designate as part 1 countries, that should not pose the Government any problems.

Amendment No. 28 would amend clause 68 so that part 2 countries are either those with which we have bilateral or multilateral treaties governing extradition arrangements.

If none of that is acceptable to the Government—I cannot rule out that possibility, as they made it clear in their reply to the Select Committee that it was not—at the very least clause 205 should be amended to provide that Orders in Council to designate new countries or to move them from one category to another should be laid on an affirmative procedure so that they can be subject to proper scrutiny in Parliament. In his reply to the Select Committee, the Minister said that he would be prepared to consider that if a strong case for change could be made, but that he had yet to be persuaded. The case seems to me to be self-evident. It is to prevent countries, some of which may have very dubious human rights records, from being added solely at the whim of Ministers. I suggest that if the Minister is not minded to concede the point today, he should at least undertake to have another look at it when the Bill goes to another place.

Amendments Nos. 25, 26, 27, 30 and 31 and new schedule 1 would amend clause 65 to incorporate in the Bill the 32 offences listed in article 2(2) of the framework document—again, in line with the recommendations of the Select Committee. I tabled the amendments because I consider it highly undesirable that Parliament should have no say in future changes to the categories of offences listed in the framework decision, just as I consider it highly undesirable that Parliament should have no say as to which countries fall into which categories. Amendment No. 27 proposes, for the same reason, that any future amendment to the list of offences should be subject to an affirmative resolution.

As with previous amendments tabled in my name, this is an argument about whether Parliament or Ministers in some future Government who might not be as benign as this one should decide what should constitute an offence. Faced with that choice, I back Parliament every time. As matters stand, Ministers will be able to change domestic law by signing up to proposals from the EC for the creation of new offences without reference to Parliament. With all due respect, it is not good enough for the Minister to say, as he does in his—very useful, by and large—reply to our report:

"The Government does not know of any plans to amend the list".

Nor is it good enough to say, as he did, that they need the flexibility to deal with any changes that are proposed. The Minister can have all the flexibility that he likes, provided that he takes Parliament with him. I hope that even at this late hour he will recant on this point.

We have signed up to a number of the amendments that the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin I has mentioned, particularly those that deal with the issue of which countries can fall into category 1. We believe that there should be a more tangible definition, and we have said that such countries should be European Union countries that have abolished the death penalty in all cases. As the hon. Member for Sunderland, South said, we have won half that battle. We are not satisfied, however, that the Government should have carte blanche to decide exactly which countries should be category 1 countries. The negative resolution procedure is inadequate for such decisions, and we should have liked them to be subject to the positive resolution procedure. At least, we want there to be a clearer definition, and we should have liked that to include only European Union countries that qualify for category 1 status.

The simplification of the extradition procedure and the consequential removal of traditional safeguards such as the dual criminality requirement mean that the EU member states and Britain will be operating under a new arrest warrant system that will involve mutual recognition. Mutual recognition rests on the presumption that judicial systems are equal across the European Union, and there is no justification for extending the principle of mutual recognition and relinquishing many procedural safeguards in the case of non-EU member states that are not part of the European arrest warrant scheme. I understand that the Commission has recently published a Green Paper on procedural safeguards for suspects and defendants in criminal proceedings which, once adopted, will further substantiate mutual trust between member states. That adds a more compelling argument to our amendments Nos. 89 and 90.

I want to say a few words about amendments Nos. 25, 26, 27, 30 and 31, and new schedule 1. We have talked about new countries coming in, and the amendments deal with the corollary to that, in the form of new offences. We have discussed the existing nebulous and unsatisfactory nature of the offences, and I shall return to that point on Third Reading if I am fortunate enough to catch your eye, .Mr. Deputy Speaker, because the Minister made some points with which I would like to take issue. He suggested that, when in Rome, we should do as the Romans do, and of course we should obey the laws in other countries, but the provision of a schedule listing 32 nebulous offences in the Bill ensures that any extension of the list to include further types of offence would be subject to parliamentary control. If there are to be further offences, let us get them right this time.

The Conservatives have talked about not joining in with these amendments because they do not approve of the list. We do not approve of the list—or of a lot of its drafting, which has led to a lack of clarity—but unfortunately the Government have signed up to it. Our amendments would provide damage limitation. If the Government were to propose any further offences, at least Parliament would have some say in the matter. For that reason, we wholeheartedly support the new clause.

My hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) made it clear that it matters not what our views on the death penalty are. What matters to me—and what should matter to the House—is that we respect the laws and punishments of sovereign nations. The Bill will undermine that principle. Indeed, the Government appear very confused over this particular aspect of it, and I am sorry to see that happen. There appears to be a level of hypocrisy coming through in relation to this part of the Bill, because they are proposing one thing to be right for Europe but not for the rest of the world. That is unacceptable.

On Second Reading, during a challenge from my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) about whether the famous plane spotters could have been extradited from the United Kingdom to Greece for their so-called crime, the former Home Office Minister, the right hon. Member for Southampton, Itchen (Mr. Denham), revealed that hypocrisy in spectacular style.

He said:

"If a country has a crime of espionage and wishes to charge people with that, that must be its right … We expect that anybody in the UK who breaks our laws can be brought before British justice and that the extradition system should enable those people, if necessary, to be brought back to face British justice."—[Official Report, 9 December 2002; Vol. 396, c. 47.]

On serious charges relating to crimes such as terrorism or murder, I agree: sovereign states should be free to set their own laws. Equally, however, they should be allowed to set their own punishments when those laws are broken. Under the Bill, a murderer could not be extradited to the United States of America because that country continues to apply the death penalty, which is condemned under the European convention on human rights.

The Government defend the sovereignty of Greece and its right to prosecute British citizens under Greek law, yet they say that we cannot help to bring a murderer to justice because American policy on capital punishment does not conform to the ECHR. Either Britain respects the sovereignty of other nations or it does not.

I oppose the proposals.

I shall confine my comments to the two broad themes of what constitutes an extradition offence and what are the criteria for designating countries under part 1 or part 2 of the Bill.

New clause 1 and amendments Nos. 1, 2 and 3 would limit the relaxation of dual criminality to terrorist offences only. After comments made on Second Reading and in the Standing Committee, the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) will not be surprised to learn that I do not accept the amendments. They are neither desirable nor workable.

There is a need to modernise our extradition law, by putting in place a fast-track regime to govern our extradition relations with countries in whose criminal justice systems we have faith. A major plank of that attempt to fast-track extradition is the relaxation of dual criminality for the 32 categories of offence on the list. I make no apology for that. In previous exchanges, I have made it clear that British citizens who go abroad and break the law of another EU country should expect to face justice, just as we would want to prosecute people who come to the UK and break our law. The lack of an exact equivalent offence in the home country does not excuse illegal conduct; nor should it be a means of avoiding extradition.

No one, least of all a Home Office Minister, underestimates the awful threat posed by terrorism, but nor can we ignore the menace of non-terrorist serious criminality and international crime. I do not believe that is what the hon. Member for Surrey Heath wants, but it would be one effect of his amendment.

Indeed, the effects of the amendment would go further. The provision would implement two routes for extradition, according to intent. The courts would be required to make a judgment about a criminal's motive. However, defining a terrorist is often problematic. It is not always possible to distinguish between, for example, drug trafficking that is carried out for personal gain and that undertaken for another purpose. Some organisations in different parts of the world are involved in drug trafficking for their own gain. Sometimes the same organisations undertake drug trafficking to fund terrorism. If we accepted the Opposition's argument, we would open up an avenue for legal challenges and arguments not about the offence committed, but about the motives of the individual who committed it.

4.30 pm

The Opposition will say that they have defined terrorism according to the Terrorism Act 2000, but that raises another problem. The definition of terrorism to be used for this purpose is based on a list of terrorist offences contained in UK legislation. In other words, according to the Opposition, the only circumstances in which we should be prepared to do away with the dual criminality requirement is where the conduct is an offence in UK law. That is an interesting back-door way to end up with the entire dual criminality requirement intact, which would be the effect of new clause 1. The hon. Member for Surrey Heath seeks to sneak in by the back door complete opposition to the relaxation of dual criminality, in effect, in terrorism cases, as well as in others, so I am opposed to new clause 1. It would effectively do away with the dual criminality proposals, for terrorism, as well as the other serious offences.

I turn now to the other amendments. I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) for tabling amendments Nos. 25, 26, 27, 30 and 31 and new schedule 1. Those amendments are relatively clear in their effect. They would place in the Bill the list of offence categories set out in the framework decision in article 2.2.

Clause 65 deals with what constitutes an extradition offence and makes it quite clear that the list of generic offences for which dual criminality will be abolished is that in the framework decision, so I suggest that no ambiguity or doubt will be occasioned by the present formulation. The list can be amended only by a unanimous decision of the Council. That would require very broad consensus, so it would be most unlikely that over-controversial or trivial offences would be added to the list.

As I said in my written reply to my hon. Friend, I am not aware of any plan to amend the list, but if it were amended, the effect would be that the Bill would be updated automatically. We need to be able to retain the flexibility to deal with changes to the list, so I am not at present persuaded that there is any need to make the change that the amendments would bring about. I recognise, however, that my hon. Friend still holds very strongly the views that he has expressed today on the point raised by the Home Affairs Committee. It remains to be seen whether Members of another place feel the same way.

I now turn to the designation of territories and amendments Nos. 16, 24, 28 and 29, tabled by the hon. Member for Surrey Heath, and amendments Nos. 89 and 90, tabled by the hon. Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr. Burnett). The effect of amendment No. 16 is that, if a country were party to the European convention on human rights, it would be automatically designated as a category 1 country. That amendment would put a huge and disproportionate amount of trust in countries that have signed up to the convention with absolutely no say domestically about whether or not they should be included in that category of streamlined extradition. The mere fact of ratifying the ECHR should not in itself lead to those countries being included in category 1. That suggestion seems to me to be a radical step, and I do not really believe that that is what the hon. Gentleman intended.

Amendments Nos. 24, 28 and 29 lay out an alternative way in which states can be designated in primary legislation. On the face of it, there would seem to be nothing wrong with those amendments. However, they would restrict our ability to add new countries to either part 1 or part 2. This is a useful opportunity for me to offer some reassurance to the House by explaining our intentions with regard to part 1 and part 2 designations.

We intend to designate all existing EU member states as part 1 countries. In the short term, it is possible that we will designate Norway and Iceland as part 1 countries. Further down the road, we will need to designate new members of the EU. Beyond that, there are no plans to add any country to part 1. It is possible, however, that at some time in the future it would be desirable to add some other country, such as a trusted Commonwealth country or regular bilateral treaty partner, to part 1. We do not believe that we should remove the flexibility to allow for that. I do not believe that there would be any great objection in the House to, say, putting Australia or Canada into part 1 if they desired it. As I have indicated, we have no plans to do so, but, equally, we do not see why our future flexibility should be unnecessarily limited.

If my hon. Friend can see no particular objection to adding any of the countries to which he has just referred, why do the Government not let the House in on the act, too?

I hear what my hon. Friend says, but, as I have said, his amendment effectively limits part 1 designation to EU countries and other Schengen countries. We need that flexibility, and there may be countries that do not fall into that category which ought, in the future, to be designated as part 1 countries, if they and we are desirous of that.

This point will be relevant on Third Reading. The exchange between the Minister and the Select Committee Chairman is a fascinating one. Is the Minister's general principle that the Government want to maintain the flexibility to use the prerogative power to set British criminal law? Is that the principle that the Government seek to enunciate?

To be honest, I am not at all sure of all the ramifications of the right hon. Gentleman's question. I am talking about the Extradition Bill and what is in it at the moment. I want to maintain the ability, which I would have thought he would think reasonable, to designate as part 1 countries those countries with which we have regular extradition communication and traffic and in whose legal systems we have a high degree of confidence.

I am sorry to delay the House, but this is a point of cardinal importance. The discussion between the Minister and the Select Committee Chairman is not about whether those countries should be added, but about whether the Government should be able to do that by prerogative power, or whether the House is the place in which such decisions about British criminal law are made.

I hear what both my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South and the right hon. Gentleman say on that, and, clearly, we will have to reflect on those comments and on others that may be made as the Bill progresses through the House. Clearly, if Members are not satisfied with the arrangements that are currently in the Bill, they will continue to make their views known, and we will continue to open our ears to those arguments. If I may, I shall move on to what may be an even bigger problem: the situation that faces us in relation to what will become part 2.

It is currently possible for any country with which we do not have standing extradition relations to make an ad hoc extradition request to the UK. We would not want to lose that facility, not least because the reciprocal nature of extradition means that losing it would put in doubt the UK's ability to make ad hoc outgoing requests. Clause 1 gives us flexibility within a defined designation process that is subject to parliamentary approval. However, I know that some people were especially worried that we might want to add the USA—a country with the death penalty—to part 1. We tabled the amendments necessary to render that impossible, and I know that many hon. Members are pleased that it is beyond doubt that we will not allow a country with the death penalty to be designated under part 1.

I am pleased that the Minister has clarified the wording of Government amendment No. 34. It says:

"A territory may not be designated for the purposes of this Part if a person found guilty in the territory of a criminal offence may be sentenced to death for the offence".

I am deeply concerned by the opening words. Why did he Government choose to use the phrase

"A territory may not be designated"

rather than stating that a territory shall not be designated if it has the death penalty?

I have heard people arguing about the difference between the words "may" and "shall" in this House and other places in many different circumstances over many years. I hope that our intention is clear, and, in case it is not, I shall clarify it: we do not intend it to be possible for any country that retains the death penalty to be designated as a category 1 country.

I welcome the Government's actions but I wonder why the provision on category 1 countries appeared in the Bill in the first place. Will the Minister elucidate on that point?

All I can say is that it was never our intention to designate the USA as a category 1 country. That is the obvious example because the USA is one of our main extradition partners. Indeed, the USA has no desire to be designated as a category I country. I hope that we are putting that fact beyond all doubt to the satisfaction of the hon. Lady and other hon. Members.

The amendments tabled by the Liberal Democrats would provide that only EU countries could be designated under part 1. As I said, in common with other EU member states and in accordance with normal practice, we intend to designate Norway and Iceland in the near future. I hope that Liberal Democrat Members will not object to that in principle, and I am sure that there was simply an oversight.

The Minister made a fascinating speech, not least when he responded to interventions made by my right hon. Friend the Member for West Dorset (Mr. Letwin), the shadow Home Secretary. His responses revealed that he has not thought through the full implications of the Government 's proposals, and we shall return to that point on Third Reading and, to a greater extent, in another place.

We entirely understand why the Minister is giving interesting signals to Conservative Members and the Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the hon. Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin). To summarise his soft words, he is signalling that after one more push in another place, the Government will probably give way with limited grace to the suggestion of including the framework list in the Bill. I encourage the hon. Member for Sunderland, South to keep talking to his friends in another place to try to ensure, as we will, that one more push will be forthcoming and we may yet get exactly what we and the Select Committee want—indeed, we may get a good deal more than we need.

4.45 pm

On the crucial issue of part I applying only to terrorism, we are not going to agree. The Minister is not going to agree with those of us on the Opposition Benches and we will have to divide the House. The central issue is the unique threat of terrorism. We had seriously hoped that including in the amendment the Government's definition of terrorism as drafted in their legislation might have concentrated their mind and persuaded them to accept that we are right to say that part 1 should apply only to such a unique set of offences. I am sorry that that attempt has failed. There is still a clear division between Government and Opposition, and we will therefore press amendment No. 1 to a vote.

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.