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Mr. Sackville: Is the hon. Gentleman saying that he supports the extension of jurisdiction to crimes committed overseas? Is that his position?
Mr. Michael: In respect of sex tourism and the abuse of children, yes it is, and I hope that the Minister will express his support for that position even if it takes him some time to produce the mechanism to implement it.I am happy to give him an opportunity to give that reassurance to the House. Hon. Members of all parties and the public want action to be taken.
Last year, the Minister of State expressed the Government's
He said:
That element of the Minister's statement goes straight to the heart of the matter. He then claimed that
But they are not sufficiently stringent in relation to the activities of British citizens abroad, even though the Minister recognised that those activities were abhorrent wherever they occurred.
We referred earlier to the videos carried back by sex tourists. The House can imagine the possibility of a successful prosecution so long as there is legislation for
such prosecutions to take place. If the door is closed against the possibility of prosecution, nothing can happen. That should not be the approach adopted by the House.
It is clear that the Government are uneasy about creating the power to prosecute in such cases. We should recognise, however, as a number of hon. Members have mentioned, that Britain has obligations under the United Nations convention on the rights of the child, which we ratified in 1991. My hon. Friend the Member for Tooting (Mr. Cox) especially referred to that in his speech.
The Minister rested a great deal of his case on the effectiveness of the law in regard to prosecutions. Prosecutions fail all the time, but the result is not that the law is abandoned--the House is asked to look for ways to strengthen the law and make it more effective.A successful law is one that leads to no prosecutions because it is obeyed.
The failure to prosecute abroad people such as football hooligans has also led to concern in this country because the problems come back to this country when the individuals involved return.
Those are the issues to which we must pay attention.I do not accept that it would necessarily involve British police wandering the streets of third-world countries at great expense to the taxpayer, as was suggested earlier. Non-governmental organisations have shown a will to help the prosecuting authorities in this country if prosecution were possible.
Australia has the same sort of common law tradition and, I believe, shares the attitude to extradition that the Minister described as ours, yet that country has decided to pass legislation to try to tackle the problem.
We must instil the fear of being caught and prosecuted, to clean up the activities of British citizens abroad and to protect vulnerable children abroad. I hope that as thehon. Member for Hendon, South takes the Bill through the House, the Minister will help him to make it a more powerful piece of legislation which more closely meets the wishes both of members of the public and of Members of Parliament to tackle the activities of British citizens abroad.
The United Nations convention on the rights of the child makes specific reference to bilateral and multinational measures. That is right and important, but the passage also involves an undertaking to
Mr. James Couchman (Gillingham):
I do not want to detain the House for long. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall) on promoting the Bill, and on introducing it to us as he did. He gave a sound and sensible explanation of its limited intentions, recognising the difficulties, especially those involving extra-territoriality. Indeed, he relied to some extent on the fact that we have an extradition treaty with Thailand. The Under-Secretary of State, on behalf of the Home Office, also placed considerable weight on that treaty.
That concerns me somewhat as I was a member of an Inter-Parliamentary Union delegation to Thailand and Indonesia in 1989 and our experience at that time was that
the Thai authorities, far from wanting to discourage such activity, simply turned a Nelson eye to the whole procedure. We had a busy week. We went to East Timor, the Cambodian refugee camps and the River Kwai, and we met countless politicians and generals. But it was held that our education about Thailand would not be complete without a visit to the district of Patpong. My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Mr. Merchant) seems to find that somewhat amusing, as we all did; it is indeed an appropriate name for that district.
We were told that we should view some of the clubs, and that is what we did. In that rather unsavoury seedy area of Bangkok we were greeted by all sorts of touts offering all sorts of services, but principally trying to sell the clubs by which they were employed. At one club the first thing that met our eye was what I can describe only as a balletic coupling by two young people, with a large audience enjoying the spectacle. From then on, it was downhill all the way.
The second club looked more like something out of Hieronymus Bosch. We were assailed on all sides by very young hostesses who made it entirely clear that all sorts of services were available. There is always comfort and strength in numbers; we were a party of eight of nine people and we all behaved perfectly, but it was clear that all those activities in that substantial district of Bangkok must have been known to the authorities, who were turning a blind eye to them. I do not for one moment believe that the Thai authorities would wish to promote sex tourism in their country, but they were certainly doing very little to discourage it. I am therefore somewhat sceptical of the robustness of Thai efforts to extradite from this country anyone who might be held to have committed any sort of crime against children in that area of Bangkok.
If I have some concern about the Bill, it is in so far as it could impinge on legitimate tourist traffic to the countries concerned. The Bill is rightly aimed at fringe organisations which are offering a particularly unpleasant service and a particularly unpleasant type of tourism, but my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, South will have to be careful in drawing up the boundaries between prosecuting those companies which promote sex tourism and those which are part of the legitimate tourist industry.
Mr. Piers Merchant (Beckenham):
Behind this Bill lie hundreds of thousands of sad and tragic cases of children who have lost their childhood, who have been assaulted and abused, who are kept in confined conditions, who descend into an evil world of crime, drugs, disease and often death and who may survive to adulthood, but will carry with them for the rest of their lives mental and physical scars.
I very much welcome the Bill, the aim of which is to address some of the problems connected with this matter. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Minister on the work
that he and his colleagues did last year and on bringing up recommendations for action before Christmas. I should like to see further action than just that encompassed in the Bill, but I do not want to say or do anything that will stand between this excellent Bill and its enactment. For that reason, I wish it a healthy and successful passage into law.
The Bill will try to deal with a severe problem--paedophile sex tourism. I believe that the Bill will drive substantial inroads into destroying that industry in this country, as it should be destroyed. Above all, the Bill provides a mechanism whereby successful prosecutions can be achieved. My hon. Friend the Minister has rightly outlined the practical differences in terms of evidence and achieving prosecutions that could be encountered by other approaches.
One of the most unacceptable features of the paedophile sex trade is the fact that, while serious offences exist in this country, which carry heavy penalties for those who break the law, there is at present no law against the same people carrying out the same offences abroad. The Bill will help address that, and that is very much to be welcomed.
It is a matter of great sadness that the UK is one of the countries responsible for large numbers of citizens going abroad to exploit children. We are in the top four--as far as statistics can carry relevance in this area--with the United States, Australia and Germany. That is greatly to be condemned and it urges action upon us.
The problem worldwide is indeed severe. I do not want to delay the House by quoting the figures, but on totting them up, one quickly approaches 1 million children who are in one way or another connected with that vile trade. The countries that have been referred to as having a severe problem are probably the tip of the iceberg. In other countries in Latin America and Africa, the same problem, or all the potential for it, exists. I am worried that, although the Bill will deal with many of the severe problems, there is a risk that it will have the effect of shifting the trade elsewhere.
For example, the requirement in the Bill that the acts must be illegal in the country in which they take place may result in the trade moving to those countries in which those acts are not illegal. As the House has been told, age limits for certain sexual acts vary greatly across the world. I hope that my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon, South (Mr. Marshall) and my hon. Friend the Minister will continue to look closely at the possibility of extending offences so that they apply extra-territorially and of including either now or at a later stage an extension of those offences that it will catch. Several severe offences are included in the schedule, but we should consider also including crimes related to the production of pornography abroad and perhaps even some offences against adults. If this Bill is not the right forum for that, I hope that the issue will be considered separately.
As my hon. Friend the Minister rightly said, there are precedents for extra-territorial offences in English law. While they may not be common under our system, there is no principled reason why they should not be examined as a possibility. As he said, other countries have introduced similar laws. While my hon. Friend the Minister is right to say that at present there are not many
examples of successful prosecutions, that has to be set against the time scale. Most of these laws have been introduced only recently. Indeed, some have been introduced only in the past 12 to 18 months. Therefore, it is necessary to consider the matter in detail and to monitor it as time moves on and other cases are brought and there are perhaps further successful prosecutions.
"determination to protect children from all forms of abuse."
"The sexual exploitation of children is particularly abhorrent, no matter where it occurs".
"our own laws in this area are among the most stringent in the world."
"take all appropriate . . . measures to prevent the abduction of, the sale of or traffic in children for any purpose or in any form."
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