Clause 12 - Right to review of delivery order
International Criminal Court Bill [Lords]
10:45 am
Mr Edward Garnier (Harborough, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 20, in page 8, line 35, at end insert—
`( ) The Secretary of State shall not give directions for the execution of a delivery order where it does not appear to him to be in the public interest to do so.'.
The debate on the amendment will be short. However, its brevity should not deceive us as to its importance. My concerns can be expressed simply. Without such an addition to the clause, the Government would appear to be making an admission that it is no longer they—let alone Parliament—who will be the decision maker on what is in the public interest. On recent occasions, the courts have made it clear that, as a general rule, the Government of the day decide what is in the public interest in a given situation. Through the absence of the wording which I want to import into the Bill there will be a massive—but hidden—transfer of political and constitutional power to an extraterritorial body. The extraterritorial body concerned is a court—the International Criminal Court—rather than a Government or an international organisation of the character and nature of the United Nations or the European Union. The way in which that transfer is being effected may not have occurred to members of the public, still less to Members of Parliament, and possibly not even to all members of the Committee. Powers are being handed over wholesale to an extraterritorial body.
The clause states that
``The Secretary of State shall not give directions for the execution of a delivery order until after the end of''
a given period. It includes various other provisions relating to habeas corpus and a prisoner's rights to be released if he is wrongly apprehended, which is fair enough, but those are technical and legal procedural legal matters. However, in an echo of a previous debate, the Secretary of State has no discretion, either on his own behalf as a member of the Government or on behalf of the country, to say that the handing over of a particular person is not in the national interest. He is completely prohibited from exercising any discretion whatever as regards the handing over of an individual to that extraterritorial body in the event that the defendant does not come under one of the exceptions that we considered under clause 5, or cannot be released following a court hearing for habeas corpus.
It will no doubt be said—and I will have to take it on the chin—that that is just bad luck. The treaty that the Government have agreed says that the ICC has complete power over that aspect of our proceedings and nothing can be done about it. The treaty is the treaty: the statute of Rome cannot be amended by this Committee, let alone Parliament as whole—and I shall have to lump it. None the less, I want the Government to place their thinking about the clause on the record. Ministers should explain to the public why they are prepared to hand over those powers to that extraterritorial body. I shall be happy to listen to any explanation. On behalf of my constituents, I am extremely worried that the Government are prepared—not only through clause 12, but other clauses—to hand over willy-nilly huge domestic constitutional powers to an extraterritorial body over which Parliament has no influence.