Examination of Witnesses (Questions 97-99)
MR TIMOTHY
KIRKHOPE, MR
MICHAEL CASHMAN,
MR GRAHAM
WATSON AND
MS JEAN
LAMBERT
28 NOVEMBER 2006
Q97 Chairman: Could I thank you all for
agreeing to come here this afternoon, which I think is probably
an unusual event for Members of the European Parliament, to give
formal evidence to a Select Committee, but there is no reason
why we should not do it and I think it is going to be very interesting
for us. Quickly by way of background, as you will probably be
aware more than most, although our Parliament has a number of
committees that specialise in scrutinising European Union affairs,
our committee, the Home Affairs Committee, has not ever, as far
as we can establish, undertaken a broad-ranging inquiry looking
at the influence of the EU on justice and home affairs issues
and we have decided to do it for the obvious reason that the EU
is becoming more and more significant in setting our own domestic
agenda, whatever we think is happening at an EU level. The visit
here, the informal meetings as well as the formal sessions, are
part of an inquiry which will last for about four months to try
to give us some strategic sense of what is going on across the
whole range of justice and home affairs issues. We are interested
in learning from you as British Members of the European Parliament
your perspectives on policy-related issues as well as the institutional
scrutiny issues that you are involved in. A number of respondents
to the inquiry, including some of you who have given us written
evidence, have mentioned public security as one of the aims of
the Union. Mr Watson, you said that the domain of public security
is probably the one where the gap between what the public expects
and what the Union provides is widest. Could I ask each of you
briefly to give us an example of an area where you think the Union
is failing in the area of public security, and others may disagree
that this is a problem? Perhaps I can start with you, Mr Watson.
Mr Watson: I am not sure, Chairman,
how widely you would wish to define public security, and this
is not terrorism related, but perhaps I could give you an example
from my own constituency, in fact, one of Don Foster's constituents.
The gentleman was married to a Spanish lady. They had a child.
The marriage broke up. The Spanish lady took the child back to
Spain. The gentleman has no rights of access to his child, has
not seen the child for two years, all kinds of problems arise.
I am sure your Members have these kinds of issues in their constituency
mailbags all the time. It is the failure of the Union to deliver
on issues like this which deeply frustrate my constituents in
the south west of England and Gibraltar because they believe that
the Union should be capable of acting. It is patently not capable
of acting because it does not have either the legal powers to
do so or the mechanisms which allow it to act effectively. I take
that as a simple example.
Q98 Chairman: Thank you. Would anybody
else like to suggest where there is a gap or to argue that there
is not a gap?
Mr Kirkhope: Chairman, I did not
put in, I do not think, any such remark. I think this comes back
to the crunch point all the time as to what should be the competences
of the EU. Graham has just underlined a very critical matter and
that is that where the EU should be working, ie, in a co-operative
effort between the nation states and their various agencies, it
fails almost every time to do so. I do not want to bang any drums
but I had a report, Joint Investigation Teams. It went
through not only this place but was then adopted by Council. It
went through your party's Queen's Speech, which is from my point
of view a slight embarrassment but it did, and it should therefore
have resulted in there being a close co-operation dealing with
major crimes and terrorist issues where joint teams could be set
up between law enforcement agencies across Europe. It did not
happen—or at least it happened, I think, on one or two cases
because I questioned recently the officials here. The reason it
has not happened properly is that people are not prepared to co-operate
to the extent necessary to make it work, so I am not so concerned
as Graham. My concerns are that in the areas of co-operation we
are not seeing the level of co-operative effort between the nation
states that we should rightly expect and which the public should
rightly expect.
Ms Lambert: Again, I think part
of this is going to depend on what we mean by public security.
Q99 Chairman: Let me say that in
Mr Watson's evidence, and I do not want to say that other people
should say the same thing, he talked amongst other things of trans-border
organised crime, illegal immigration or terrorism. He obviously
has taken it into an area of civil law but it is perhaps in those
major issues of crime, terrorism and immigration.
Ms Lambert: One of those I would
have some particular concerns about would be questions on trafficking,
and obviously there are particular areas where the UK does not
necessarily join in with the European continent in terms of issues
about the 30-day residents' permit, et cetera, but I do
think that there are a lot of ways in which we could be developing
far more in terms of evidence coming about how we could disrupt
trafficking rings, how we could deal with and imprison traffickers,
where again the areas of co-operation that Timothy has indicated
are not there. They are certainly not as well developed as they
might be, not least because I think we are looking at a single
source of information almost coming via the police rather than
other areas on the employment side, et cetera, where we
could draw information, so that we have a lot of things which
look very good on paper but, again, you really feel that the background
work is not being done to tackle as appropriately as it might
be.
Mr Cashman: I welcome Tim's gesture
towards greater co-operation between Member States, and long may
it be so. On the area where I believe we are failing, there are
two areas. One is a lack of uniformity of approach, and on that
I give the example of the need in some Member States to carry
identification papers, whether it is an ID card or something you
got from your local quartier here in Belgium, and so citizens
are acting in a kind of vacuum. A British citizen could be stopped
in one of the Member States, their ID is demanded, they do not
have it. Arguably in some Member States they could be taken off
to the nearest police station. That kind of lack of uniformity
causes problems for the citizen. Where I think we cause problems
for one another, and I give the example of the European External
Borders Agency, FRONTEX, is that we set up these organisations
and then we fail to give them the resources, either the personnel
or the financial resources, or certain Member States, and I cite
Poland in this example, make it very difficult for that agency
to carry out the work that it is mandated to do. That arguably
in the EU is one of the most important jobs, which is our new
external borders and the protection of those. I cite those as
my two examples.
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