Sir Patrick Cormack (South Staffordshire) (Con)

3.12 pm

My right hon. and learned Friend spoke about the appalling conditions in American jails. What has conditioned public opinion in this country perhaps more than anything else over the past two or three weeks are the accounts of the chains, the manacles and the cages, and people who are innocent until proved guilty being put in those conditions thousands of miles away from home. It is emotive and I make no apology for being emotive. It is important that Ministers should recognise how deeply concerned and disturbed people are by those accounts.

The Solicitor General did not give way to me, although he made some pleasant enough remarks. I was seeking to ask him precisely what assurances would be given about bail. It is all very well for the noble Baroness Scotland to go to the United States. I have a high regard for Baroness Scotland. She is a most eloquent and persuasive Minister, but that is not good enough.

My right hon. and learned Friend spoke about the present American ambassador to Britain and in what high regard he is held. What should be done in a case like this is that the American ambassador should be politely invited to No. 10 Downing street by the Prime Minister, and the Attorney-General should be there. The American ambassador should be presented with a copy of the report of this debate and told just how concerned hon. Members in all parts of the House are about the matter.

Dr. Murrison: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for allowing me to intervene. My constituent, Mr. Giles Darby, is facing extradition tomorrow. Does my hon. Friend understand that he will hardly be reassured by the Prime Minister’s protestations that all is being done to improve the bail conditions for him? Once he is there, he will be subject to due process, which involves all the penalties to which my hon. Friend has referred.

Sir Patrick Cormack: Yes, but we are close allies of the United States. I strongly agree with the points made about the extradition process by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) and others, but we are where we are. I deplore the fact that the constituent of my hon. Friend the Member for Westbury (Dr. Murrison) will be getting on a plane tomorrow. I hope, even at this late hour, that there will be a delay, but there may not be.

I do not know whether my hon. Friend’s constituent and his colleagues are guilty or innocent. I do know about the disparity in sentences so eloquently described by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham, and I know that in this country it has been deemed that there are no charges to
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answer. Whether there is guilt for some crime committed in the United States I do not know, but I am exceptionally concerned that those people should get on a plane tomorrow or at any other time and be incarcerated in those conditions.

I hope that the Solicitor-General will speak to the Attorney-General immediately after the debate. I hope that they together will go and see the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is highly regarded in the United States. He has been given the congressional medal of honour. I teased him about that at the Liaison Committee last week, suggesting that he should go and get it. He is held in high regard, and this is a serious matter because three people’s lives—the conditions in which they live their lives over the next two or three years—are at stake.

I very much hope the Prime Minister will exercise the influence that he undoubtedly has upon the American ambassador and, through him, on the American Administration to say that there are certain things that we are above all enjoined to do in any democracy. One of those is to protect the welfare of our citizens, who are innocent until proved guilty.

I am not suggesting that we can go back to the days of 1850, when Palmerston spoke for some hours in the predecessor of this Chamber. As dawn broke, he was speaking in the Don Pacifico debate. However, the lessons of the Don Pacifico debate are to some degree still relevant today. I took the liberty of re-reading Palmerston’s speech and I should like to quote from it. He said that

“whether, as the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say Civis Romanus sum; so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him against injustice and wrong.”

We in the Chamber may not use such grandiloquent terms today, but we still have the same duty as our predecessors had to protect the innocent until proved guilty, to uphold the dignity of mankind, and to ensure that even the closest of alliances does not lead to any supine posture on our part. So although I have a regard for the Solicitor-General and the Attorney-General, and I make no comment about the merits of the case or judgments or any such thing, on the simple issue of human decency we have a duty to look after these three people and to ensure that if they have a trial, it is a fair one, and if they have to wait for their trial, they wait in civilised conditions on this side of the Atlantic with their families, not on the other side of the Atlantic. I look to the Government and to the Prime Minister in particular to ensure that that is so.

3.19 pm

I shall not discuss every contribution for the simple reason that all but one of those who contributed spoke from the same perspective: we have an unacceptably asymmetric treaty and extradition arrangement that act against the interests of British citizens. The sole exception was the Solicitor-General, who clearly

The Solicitor-General: The hon. Gentleman says that I wished to focus entirely on one case; in fact, I did not. My notes were broad in relation to the treaty and the Extradition Act. I found it necessary to focus on the one case because I took a large number of interventions that dealt with it and therefore responded to the House’s wish to examine some of the issues in that case. I agree that we ought to have spent more time discussing the treaty and the Act rather than the specific case.

Mr. Heath: I am grateful to the Solicitor-General for his comments, but I think that most right hon. and hon. Members found an opportunity to discuss the general principles.

Let me sound one serious note of criticism in respect of the Solicitor-General’s remarks. I found his reference to “the Enron three” abhorrent. It was suggested that that is common usage, but in fact it is common usage only among Ministers. It is clearly pejorative and it is not an expression that the Solicitor-General—a Law Officer—should have used in this Chamber.

The Solicitor-General: When it was pointed out to me that the reference may well be prejudicial, I agreed not to use it.

Mr. Galloway: On a point of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker. I counted five references to “the Enron three” after the Solicitor-General said that he would not use the term again. The record will show that.

Mr. Deputy Speaker: That is not a point of order for me. It is a matter for argument and debate.

The Solicitor-General: To complete my intervention on the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath). If I did as the hon. Member for Bethnal Green and Bow (Mr. Galloway) says, let me make it clear that I repeatedly said that at no point did I seek to prejudge or prejudice in any way the case in relation to those individuals, who, like all accused people, have a right to be considered innocent until proved guilty. That is my fundamental view and it applies to those individuals as well as to any others.

Mr. Heath: Of course I accept the Solicitor-General’s words at face value, but I repeat that the term is pejorative and could have been regarded as prejudicial had it been used in relation to a case that was still
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before a British court. It is extraordinary that it was almost claimed that a prima facie case had been proven against those individuals, despite the fact that no court has had the opportunity properly to examine the evidence and irrespective of the points made by the judge in the initial case.

Let me now discuss the general points on which the debate has focused. There is real concern about the asymmetry of the arrangements. That is nothing to do with the fact that the treaty is yet to be ratified—a fact that, to many people in this country, adds insult to injury. Even if the treaty were ratified tomorrow, it would remain an unfair treaty that the Liberal Democrats would oppose. I almost welcome the fact that it has not been ratified, because that might give us the opportunity to renegotiate.

The Government have behaved in an extraordinary fashion. First, let us consider ratification. The then Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett), in a written statement on 31 March 2003—our first opportunity to know about the treaty—said:

“Before the treaty can come into force it needs to be ratified by the United States Senate.”—[ Official Report, 31 March 2003; Vol. 402, c. 42WS.]

As a statement of fact, that is true. Before the treaty can come into force, it has to be ratified by the Senate. What he omitted to mention was the fact that the British Government would not bother with bringing the treaty into force, but would instead ensure that its provisions came into force long before the Senate had had even the opportunity to not consider it. It is almost irrelevant whether the treaty is ratified, because the British Government, in an apparent attempt to curry favour with the US Administration, have already enacted all its provisions into our law.

Secondly, there is the matter of reciprocity. We have heard what I can only describe as sophistical arguments from the Law Officers and other Ministers about the equivalence of the provisions. I simply cannot reconcile their statements with what was plainly said by Home Office Ministers when we considered the orders made under the 2003 Act. In the Standing Committee on Delegated Legislation, the hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint) stated:

“In contrast, when we make extradition requests to the United States, we will need to submit sufficient evidence to establish ''probable cause''. That is a lower test than prima facie but a higher threshold than we ask of the United States, and I make no secret of that.”—[ Official Report, Third Standing Committee on Delegated Legislation, 15 December 2003; c. 7.]

It is impossible to reconcile that with what the Prime Minister said today and what the Law Officers have been saying in both Houses over the past two days.

Thirdly, there is the matter of application. We were told explicitly by Ministers that there was a limit to the application of the measures. I challenged that in the Committee, but was told by the hon. Member for Don Valley that

“We do not have such a range of offences involving financial crime. The cases mentioned by the Financial Times—such as price fixing—would not apply. Dual criminality would have to exist.”—[ Official Report, Third Standing Committee on Delegated Legislation, 15 December 2003; c. 26.]

That is directly countermanded by the fact that dual criminality was expressed in the form of the catch-all
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conspiracy to defraud provision, which meant that the individuals in the very case to which attention was drawn in Committee are now subject to extradition proceedings, so I cannot talk about the matter further.

Throughout the early stages of the legislation, we heard the refrain that it was all about terrorism. I do not want to dwell on the Conservatives’ position, because I welcome their support today. I utterly respect what the right hon. and learned Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard) said. I agreed with everything he said, which is a rare occurrence indeed. He admitted that the Conservatives had been gullible in believing what the Government said, he acknowledged that mistake and said that he would recommend to his right hon. and hon. Friends that they avoid repeating it. I exempt the right hon. Member for Wokingham (Mr. Redwood), who was a member of the Standing Committee and failed to vote on the draft order, who said

“perhaps the US-UK arrangements are a little less unbalanced than the Liberal Democrat spokesman has suggested”.—[ Official Report, Third Standing Committee on Delegated Legislation, 15 December 2003; c. 19.]

Well, he was wrong—they were every bit as unbalanced as I suggested and the right hon. Gentleman has now come to realise the folly of his position. The fact is that it was suggested that the legislation was to deal with big crimes and terrorism, when it was clear that it would apply to every offence that carried a tariff of more than one year’s imprisonment. That was clear to me right from the beginning.

We have an imbalance in the evidential requirements. The American authorities have to do little more than establish identity and the grounds for issuing a warrant—a much lower evidential test than anyone else must meet. We know that huge mistakes are made as a result of misidentification. Mr. Derek Bond, a rotary club member from Clifton in Bristol, was arrested in South Africa on the basis of CIA information that he was an international gangster and money launderer.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North-East Fife (Sir Menzies Campbell) was right in Committee when he said:

“However, I ask those who feel tempted or disposed to vote for the orders to wait until a constituent is the subject of extradition proceedings on the basis of identification alone. I am willing to bet my bottom dollar, since we are talking about the US, that they will be beating at the doors of the Minister and the Home Office to say how unfair and unreasonable our provisions are that allow for their constituents to be treated in that way.”—[ Official Report, Third Standing Committee on Delegated Legislation, 15 December 2003; c. 21.]

That is what we have seen today.

We should be concerned about the fact that we are dealing with 50 different state jurisdictions, plus the federal jurisdiction. Who knows what applies to Guantanamo Bay? We should be worried about the extra-territorial jurisdiction claimed by the Americans and about retrospectivity. Most of all, we should be concerned that we alone of the 132 states with which the US has bilateral extradition arrangements are willing to allow our citizens to be extradited on the basis of such a low and unequal burden of proof. A Minister acting under duress could not have signed a worse treaty and I object to that supine acquiescence, not because I am anti-American, but because a sovereign power such as Britain should defend the
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interests of British citizens. We are not a wholly owned subsidiary of the US. I urge the Government, even at this late stage, to consider tabling amendments to the Police and Justice Bill in another place, to consider revisions to the Extradition Act 2003, and to consider renegotiating the treaty. They should not be afraid to abrogate it, because it has been abrogated by the American Senate, which refused to ratify it. Let us deal with a situation that the people of this country recognise as unfair and which, I am pleased to see, the vast majority of hon. Members recognise as unfair, too.