Thursday, 20 September 2018

Nobody move or law-abiding citizens get hurt!

From the BBC:

A no-deal Brexit would make it harder to protect UK citizens, a leading police officer has warned. The Home Office has given £2m to police to work on replacing systems such as the European Arrest Warrant.

Sara Thornton, chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council said fallback systems would be slower. She said it could be harder to pursue suspects like those blamed for the poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in March.

EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier has ruled out Britain using the European Arrest Warrant after Brexit. At the moment, it is used more than 1,500 times a year.

UK Police face losing access to 40 law enforcement tools under a no-deal Brexit, such as the Schengen Information System, an intelligence database used 539 million times last year by British authorities to look up suspects and vehicles. The fallback is an Interpol system which is not automated.


For sure, if 'they' want to be spiteful, they will chuck the UK out of these information-sharing and co-operation agreements to everybody's overall detriment, which is 'their' call, not ours.

But as per usual, the argument ignores the big difference between deportation and extradition.

Most people (including me) get much more upset about foreign criminals whom we can't deport than about UK criminals who have absconded abroad whom we can't get back.

Leaving the EU will make it easier for the UK to deport foreign criminals (less of this human rights crapola). If the quid pro quo is that it is harder to get other countries to extradite criminals back to the UK to face punishment here, that is a price worth paying IMHO. Good riddance.

Logic also tells us that even if it is 'harder' for the UK to get other countries to extradite criminals back to UK, if we tell those other countries who they are, they will be happy to deport them anyway, achieving the same result.

10 comments:

James James said...

Leaving the EAW was one of the reasons I voted Leave. It allows other European states to force Britain to extradite people for things which are not crimes in Britain. It also allows other European states to extradite someone for one thing, then charge him for another. It forces extradition even if the probability of a fair trial is low.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JJ, yes, the EAW is a terrible system. So that's a win.

James James said...

The real story here is that Theresa May took us into the EAW despite not having to and promising not to, and now she wants to keep us in it. The EU may impose bad laws, but even after we leave there will be no shortage of politicians volunteering for them. Brexit is only stage 1.

James James said...

One of the advantages of a no-deal exit is that it changes the negotiating position. At present, the EU can promise to do things that are mutually damaging, as a form of brinkmanship. E.g. they can say "no free movement of goods without free movement of people", hoping that we will prefer free movement of both to free movement of neither.

But once we leave, then it will be the EU that has to choose: do they want free movement of goods or not? Free movement of people will be off the table.

What we should have done is announce the Norway option as the baseline no-deal scenario (we can do it without EU permission), with no free movement of people a la Liechtenstein, then started negotiating for perks on top of that.

Mark Wadsworth said...

JJ, you know the rules.

Negotiate a really shit exit deal and then grudgingly allow a second referendum.

Lola said...

This is very worrying "... an intelligence database used 539 million times last year by British authorities to look up suspects and vehicles.... five hundred and thirty-nine MILLION times. Bloody Hell. If Brexit stops that I am doubly for it. That's nearly 1.5 MILLION times A DAY. Just what the Hell can possibly justify that quantity of searches? What can they be looking for?

View from the Solent said...

" That's nearly 1.5 MILLION times A DAY. "

No Lola, that's just a load of bullshit. Even at 1 minute per inquiry that comes to 25,000 enquiry-hours. Or perhaps that is why the streets are police-free

Mark Wadsworth said...

L, VFTS, good points. There are only 500 million-odd people in the EU. Did they look up every single petson?

L fairfax said...

@"Logic also tells us that even if it is 'harder' for the UK to get other countries to extradite criminals back to UK, if we tell those other countries who they are, they will be happy to deport them anyway, achieving the same result."
The Spanish didn't extradite British criminals to the UK in the late 70s/80s and it created British crime networks there.
I would hope that people have learnt from this stupidity.

formertory said...

.... That's nearly 1.5 MILLION times A DAY. Just what the Hell can possibly justify that quantity of searches? What can they be looking for?...

That's the sort of thing that feeds the "they're watching me" paranoia.
Perhaps, with all the ANPR cameras around these days - speed cameras, police cars, city centres - they routinely fire off search queries for a proportion of number plates read. Just on a speculative "wonder who that is?" basis.