Clause 29 - Hearing witnesses abroad through
Crime (International Co-operation) Bill [Lords]
3:00 pm
Mr Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 43, in
clause 29, page 17, line 12, at end insert—
'(1A) An order under subsection (1) shall be made by statutory instrument and may not be made unless a draft of the statutory instrument containing the order has been laid before and approved by a resolution of each House of Parliament.'.
The amendment would insert new subsection (1A), which would require the affirmative procedure to be used. The Committee will be familiar with the belief of
those on the Opposition Benches that that is an important safeguard.
We strongly support the use of television and video links. Indeed, when I practised as a corporate lawyer, I had the happy experience of using the very first video link suite installed north of the border. I am particularly sorry that the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) is not on the Liberal Democrat Benches this afternoon, because it was a particularly enterprising firm of Writers to the Signet of Edinburgh that had installed one of the video suites. I used it for video conferencing, from the offices of the company south of the border to which I was group legal adviser, with the Scots lawyers that we were working with north of the border, on a matter that had not yet gone to court, but might subsequently have done so.
I therefore saw for myself, in the early days of video conferencing suites, how useful they could be in legal cases. I am pleased that they are now used much more extensively, particularly in cases in which witnesses are overseas or that involve child witnesses, and their use has grown in all parts of the legal profession. Nothing that I say about the clause is intended to deprecate the use of the new facilities; I think that they can be extremely useful, and it is good that a general expansion of their use is set out in the clause. However, I would prefer to have the affirmative resolution procedure in the clause.