Orders of the Day — Extradition Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 8:57 pm on 9 December 2002.

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Photo of Mike Gapes Mike Gapes Labour/Co-operative, Ilford South 8:57, 9 December 2002

Indeed. The reality of the situation today is that we have about 200 nation states, the United Nations, the International Labour Organisation and the World Trade Organisation, and a huge number of international covenants and treaties dealing with genocide, crimes against humanity, laws of war and many of the issues that are currently considered when we discuss the workings of the International Criminal Court. In those circumstances, it is absurd for extradition legislation to be based on a pre-modern age—the Victorian age and the age of empire. For those reasons, significant modernisation is well overdue.

There are also other reasons; for example, the current system does not work and allows the wealthy criminals and the criminal lawyers to benefit from their expenditure to avoid justice. I use the phrase Xcriminal lawyers" advisedly. Some people in the legal profession do well out of representing international criminals, drug dealers and people who are engaged in crimes in one country, live in another and have offshore assets in some bank account that is hard to get at.

We live in an age when people use the internet to commit crimes. They perpetrate sophisticated fraud on gullible and/or innocent people. Yet the international policing organisations are often unable to track them down. We have heard the debates about paedophilia, and we know that racist, Nazi groups use the internet. We also know that Nazi groups who operate in Germany are based in Denmark because they can easily get across to Schleswig-Holstein and smuggle in literature. Current Danish law does not allow them to be picked up or prosecuted because Denmark has an absolutist, free-speech approach, which some Conservative Members favour.

It is fortunate that this country has laws against incitement to racial hatred. We have the Public Order Act 1986, and other legislation, which is not enforced strictly enough against organisations that peddle race hate, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. I should like us, like some other European countries, to have a law relating to holocaust denial. Britain should be alleged to be a sanctuary for neither terrorists nor racists and extremists.

Let me give a specific example. For many years, the people who carried out the bombing in Bologna in the 1980s lived in Brighton, and nothing was done about it. They were linked with far-right groups such as the League of St. George, and involved in fascist training camps, yet they lived in Brighton without anything being done about it. That is outrageous. I hope that a common European arrest warrant and provisions for a Government to ask for extradition would lead to a solution to such a problem.

We have experienced problems over the years that relate to Northern Ireland; for example, we had problems with the Irish Republic. I believe that they have been resolved since the Belfast agreement. Nevertheless, the Irish courts often refused to extradite. We experienced similar problems with the United States. For example, IRA fundraisers, people who were wanted for crimes, and even people who had escaped from prison could live in the USA because the courts would not extradite them to this country.

The Bill may not be a perfect solution, but it highlights a genuine problem that must be tackled. The way in which Conservative Members and Liberal Democrat Members in the House of Lords deal with the Bill when it emerges from this House will be interesting. The past two or three years have shown that the Conservative-Liberal alliance in the House of Lords can defeat the Labour Government, with their democratic majority, whenever it chooses. Labour has only 26 per cent. of the peers in the upper House. The Liberals and the Conservatives have ganged up on several Home Office measures in recent years. That presents more of a challenge to the Liberals than the Conservatives, because I expect the latter to use their normal approach in the House of Lords. However, the Liberals have to reconcile their pro-European stance with their libertarianism. Perhaps they will have a problem in deciding which side to choose; maybe they will sit on the fence.