On October 15 the home secretary, Theresa May, stated in parliament that the UK government’s ‘current thinking’ is to ‘opt out’ of more than 130 European Union measures for police and criminal justice co-operation and then to try and opt back in to an unspecified number of them, with uncertainty as to whether or not the other EU members will allow the UK back in.
Her statement completely misunderstands the main challenges of fighting modern crime.
Crime is now global. Criminal enterprise is organized by international syndicates which take advantage of differing national approaches to policing and criminal justice.
The home office’s own UK threat assessment is clear that the greatest criminal threats to our communities come from trafficking of drugs, weapons and cigarettes, organized people smuggling, fraud and counterfeiting. The constant threat of terrorism remains a significant threat.
These crimes are organized by sophisticated and wealthy organizations which use the most up-to-date forms of technology and exploit weak points in law enforcement, particularly across borders.
A coherent European response is essential.
The challenge for policing is to strengthen law enforcement in a way which brings these criminals to justice and makes it far more difficult for them to operate effectively.
High quality use of intelligence and effective operational partnership and co-operation are the main means of achieving this.
Knowledge can be acquired by a variety of methods including interception of phone calls and use of telecommunications data; monitoring of travel across international borders; development of DNA, fingerprint and vehicle databases; and direct surveillance, CCTV and automatic number plate recognition. Other forms of identification can help identify the movement of criminals.
European intelligence sharing improves our capacity to fight these criminal organizations. Current arrangements, and planned improvements, include allowing police and law enforcement organizations access to the EURODAC asylum database; developing the SIS/SIS2 databases; development of the VIS database; and EU-wide (except for the UK opt-out) rules which link databases containing DNA, fingerprint, and vehicle registration records.
These techniques have successfully brought many criminals to justice and have prevented planned future crime.
The second core requirement is strong operational co-operation between police and security forces.
This has developed over some years and now EUROPOL co-ordinates over 12,000 cross-border investigations every year. Britain plays a leading role.
Such effective co-operation depends upon mutual trust which can only be built in practice over time and is deeply threatened by a UK opt-out.
Judicial co-operation is the final weapon which strengthens law enforcement against criminality. This includes the power of arrest, extradition and sentencing policy. EUROJUST is the EU agency which promotes such co-operation, of which the most significant is the European Arrest Warrant.
This has brought suspected criminals to justice far more speedily and has made it more difficult for UK criminals to escape justice in the rest of the European Union. An illustration is ‘Operation Captura’, for which the European Arrest Warrant was essential, which helped bring to justice 44 of the 60 most wanted criminals on the Mediterranean coast of Spain (the so-called ‘Costa del Crime’).
UK policing and crime prevention is significantly strengthened by full UK participation in the European intelligence databases, European police and judicial operational co-operation. UK withdrawal would significantly damage our ability to contest major criminality.
It is extraordinary that David Cameron and Theresa May have abandoned the security interests of Britain in order to curry favour from the ignorant, partisan and prejudiced anti-European Union views of a handful of Conservative backbenchers. Let’s hope that saner counsels prevail over time.
Charles Clarke was home secretary from 2004-2006
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