Clause 53
Policing and Crime Bill
12:45 pm
James Brokenshire (Shadow Minister, Home Affairs; Hornchurch, Conservative)
Clause 53 deals with the treatment of time served outside the UK following extradition to a category 1 territory where the person was already serving a sentence of imprisonment in this country. It provides that extradition will count as time served against the sentence in the UK where the person was extradited for the purposes of being prosecuted for an offence and was held in custody.
The effect of the provisions and, indeed, existing section 59 of the Extradition Act 2003, is to provide that sentences will be served, in effect, concurrently, rather than consecutively, should some form of custody be required in the third-party state. Through amendment 253, which is more a probing amendment than anything else, I seek to understand better and to question how the provision operates in relation to the Government’s early release scheme and, more generally, the rehabilitation of offenders and release on licence.
If the person extradited from the UK to an overseas territory is returned to the UK following the determination of proceedings in the overseas territory, what assessment is made of their suitability for early release? Obviously, the party will have been outside the jurisdiction, and there is a question whether normal early release provisions would apply. Equally, what information is provided to enable judgments on the need for release, which might need to be made almost instantaneously, to be undertaken, to enable other protective arrangements to be put in place, and to ensure that appropriate arrangements with probation services and so on are likely to be adhered to properly?
Subsection (4) talks about the person’s period in custody in the overseas territory counting. Is the intention that there should be any broad equivalence of the type of custody involved? The Minister will accept that there may be a difference in the nature of the custody that will be taken into account for someone being released from a category B prison on extradition to a third party state. If we are to try to rehabilitate to prevent reoffending, appropriate rehabilitative systems need to be in place. If extradition is taking place part-way through a sentence, how does that interrelate with rehabilitative programmes and with the Government’s early release scheme?