Clause 62 - Cases that may be retried
Criminal Justice Bill
3:00 pm
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield, Conservative)
Indeed it did. It can happen readily. The Scots, not wishing to have a double jeopardy rule—perhaps they are right; they are certainly entitled to their view—would not want that special relationship to be exploited in a way that allowed police officers to summon witnesses from Scotland in order to participate in a procedure that they were not happy with. The only alternative would be some sort of extradition procedure from Scotland. However, I would not expect the Minister to be happy with a procedure that tended to emphasise a degree of Scots separateness.
I do not know what the procedures under Schengen will be, but I assume that although other countries have retrials in their own jurisdictions, we certainly could not get someone from Scotland to retry them, although we would be quite happy to send them from London to be retried. I assume that if someone has been acquitted in Germany, and the German authorities want to waive the double jeopardy rule—I think I have got it right; the Minister said that they have a way of doing that—he ought to go and live in Glasgow, because he could not be extradited to Germany from there, any more than he could be subject to the English procedure for retrial.