Making sure Europe works for us

By Claude Moraes MEP

Every member state gains from EU membership and every member state wants to see the advantages of collective economic and political power improve over time. But sometimes, good European policy gets lost in translation. Labour’s job is to counter this, and ensure that the UK gets the best possible deal from Europe by clearly considering our practical interests abroad.

One such example of this is the European Arrest Warrant (EAW). The EAW was a necessary and good innovation. Extradition was a nightmare, with serious criminals waiting up to nine months to be transferred back to the country in which they had committed their crimes. This situation placed an unreasonable burden on the UK’s justice and penal system, as well as on those of other member states. Such a situation also placed an unforgivable strain on the victims of cross-border crime, who had to wait far too long to see justice done. The EAW changed that, reducing extradition time to between 10 and 90 days. This was of real benefit to those with a stake in seeing cross-border justice carried out, particularly the UK justice system, as it sped up our ability to remove dangerous criminals from Britain.

Many high profile, concrete examples exist of the benefits to be gathered from cross border extradition. In 2005, an EAW provided the legal framework for the extradition of Osman Hussain, a suspect in the London suicide bombings of July that year. Hussain was returned to Britain from Italy, an outcome critical to seeing justice done in the UK. In 2007, Hussain was found guilty, and handed a 40 year sentence for conspiracy to murder.

But the EAW has become controversial in the UK, and almost consistently disparaged in the British press, by Eurosceptics, and by the centre right.

Why?

For the main part, the EAW is being used for too many trivial offences, not at all how the procedure was intended by those who originally designed it. That is damaging an imperfect but essential policing tool in Europe and disadvantaging the UK.

April in fact saw Commissioner Viviane Reding point out just this point; that trivial offences are damaging the authority of the EAW. One example suffices: more than 2,400 requests were received by the UK from Poland in 2010, most of them nowhere near justified in terms of the import of the cases at hand.

Now, myself and other Labour MEPs are pushing for more changes, ones that will keep the benefits of the EAW and drastically lessen the downsides.

National governments, and national politics, demand consistent results from Europe. This is certainly true of the UK, where European Union membership is often assailed by a Eurosceptic lobby. For the main part, good European policy is lost by individual European governments easily swayed by anti-European arguments and sentiments. That’s why Labour will do better than a knee jerk reaction to the EAW, pushing to change those parts of European Arrest Warrants which don’t work whilst always working to facilitate the work of British police and courts in Britain.