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Lord Wallace of Saltaire: I will speak to Amendments Nos. 6 and 7. For these purposes, I will take a different
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direction from the noble Baroness, Lady Rawlings. I will add to the discussion that we are having across these amendments. It becomes increasingly important to have some clarification from the Government about the different degrees and dimensions of diplomatic status and immunities. There was some confusion in the previous discussion about the sort of diplomatic status and immunities held by some recent ex-students of mine when they were in the Ukraine as election observers, which were different from the status and immunities of people stationed in London. That is one reason why we are asking for a review and preferably a publication from the Government about where we are going with all of this.
On these Benches, we welcome the proliferation of agencies within the European Union, but we question how far they need the sort of status, immunities and protections that have traditionally been granted to international organisations. I hope we can all agree—even the noble Lords, Lord Stoddart of Swindon and Lord Pearson of Rannoch—that the European Union is a little more than an intergovernmental organisation. It may be a little less than a federation, but we are not in the traditional world of international organisations operating in difficult foreign territory. We therefore wish to raise again the question of where we are going beyond where we are now.
Amendment No. 6 lists three illustrative recent organisations. My noble friend Lord Roper may wish to say a little about the Institute for Security Studies, on which he has a degree of expertise having been the director of its predecessor organisation. I have been struggling to discover how far ATHENA is a serious organisation, but my noble friend Lord Garden and I were listening to the director general of the European Defence Agency yesterday morning. I gather that the European Defence Agency has a staff that has grown from 20 to 80 in the past six months and is due to expand further. I am conscious that the European Police College (CEPOL) is just getting underway and established in this country in Bramshill, and someone brought to my attention yesterday that the European School Culham has some elements of special status and immunities because it operates in this country—indeed, there was an order to that effect. There are also Eurojust and Europol. Things are moving very rapidly under Titles V and VI which relate to justice and home affairs and the security and defence dimensions of the European Union. We tabled these amendments to mark that, as a member state of the European Union, Her Majesty's Government ought to be asking on our behalf how far these agencies, as they expand, need to have these traditional diplomatic privileges.
I also asked some American colleagues whether federal district courts or representatives of the FBI operating in Oklahoma have any special status or privileges because, in a sense, they are foreigners operating in Oklahoma. Of course, they do not. They are subject to state tax and state law as well as federal law.
We recognise that the European Union is an intermediate body, not a federation, but there are questions that need to be asked as the European Union
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slips from the traditional world into another and as a large number of new agencies are created and are likely to go on being created in the future.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch: I hesitate to break the new-found harmony that has been established with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, by saying that the privileges and immunities that we are conferring on the European Union in this Bill—if we do so—take us one more step along the road to the mega-state that we all fear. It is a step in that direction.
This is the time to repeat the Written Question the Answer to which has winged its way post haste, at the very last moment, to my office in my absence. I feel sure that the Government have the Answer ready to give us now. The Written Questions that concern these amendments simply ask the Government which European Union institutions are already eligible for immunities and tax privileges—if there are any institutions in that category. What are those immunities and privileges? To which European Union institutions do the Government propose to grant similar status under the Bill? I hope that the answer will not be bodies established under Titles V and VI of the TEU, because that would not be very helpful. I would be most grateful if the Minister could tell me in detail what we are dealing with at the moment.
Lord Stoddart of Swindon: I would like to say a couple of words because people are very concerned about many European Union organisations. Many people believe, for example, that the servants of Europol have immunities in this country that ought not to be granted to them, because they involve police work. In this country, where police work is involved, we have the police complaints commission—or whatever it is now called—to which people who are aggrieved can appeal. However, I understand that, in the case of officers operating under Europol, there can be no redress.
People are concerned about the immunities that have been granted to Europol and will presumably be granted under the area of foreign policy and security, which would be a huge extension of the foreign policy and defence regimes. There will be movement of all sorts of people between countries and presumably those people will be granted immunities. That is a very big extension of the whole business.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said that he believed that the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch, and myself would agree with him that the EU was more than an intergovernmental organisation. Of course, that is what we have been saying for a very long period of time, and it is that which concerns us; that far from being an intergovernmental organisation it is developing not into a federation, but into a unitary state. Government sources say that is not so; it is still a collection of independent states. Although there is agreement between the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, and myself, he is obviously not in agreement with the Government, because the Government say that we are not on the
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way to federation, we are not on the way to a single European state, and we remain a collection of independent states.
I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. Let me try to get to the logic of this. If he is right, and if we are on the road to a unitary or a federal state, why do they need immunities? Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, because they are part of the United Kingdom, do not have special immunities. Why on earth would they want these immunities, if we are on the road to this single state, or federal state? Because they will be operating in what is, even now, virtually a unitary state.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has introduced an important point. In answering my question, it may well be that we will get the Government's point of view as to what exactly the European Union is. Perhaps they could reassert that it is a collection of independent, sovereign states, and that is how they intend it to remain. Or do they agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, that we are on the way, or perhaps we are virtually there, to a unitary or federal state?
Lord Roper: I want to raise one question with the Minister that follows up something that my noble friend Lord Wallace said on an earlier amendment. I should declare a historic interest; I was the founding director of a body which was then not part of the European Union, but was a subsidiary of another international organisation, Western European Union, but which has now become an agency of the European Union, and would therefore perhaps in some way benefit from these things. To my surprise, it is mentioned in Amendment No. 6.
I want to make a distinction. Do we necessarily need to have the same sorts of immunities for all the sorts of agencies that might be created under the European Union? There seems to me to be a possible division into three categories. There are obviously agencies and institutions that are based in this country, which would need to have a set of immunities and diplomatic status for some of their staff. There is a second category of those based outside the United Kingdom, but who may have substantial operations in this country, and therefore are here on a regular basis, although not physically based and paid within the United Kingdom. There is a third category of organisations that are based outside this country, and whose staff either make no visits, or very occasional ones.
It may be that as a matter of habit and in terms of diplomatic practice, it is appropriate to provide the same sets of immunities for each of these three categories of agencies. In the light of what my noble friend Lord Wallace said earlier about looking at this again and trying to see whether one does not need to have a rather more discriminating approach, I raise with the Minister the question of whether we need to provide exactly the same sorts of diplomatic immunities for all these different categories of agencies that might be created under the European Union.
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5.45 p.m.
Lord Triesman: The amendment would limit the EU bodies on which privileges and immunities could be conferred under the clause to those bodies established pursuant to the provisions of the Maastricht Treaty. The words,
are intended to cover the amendments made to the Maastricht Treaty by the Treaty of Amsterdam and the Treaty of Nice.
I shall give an example. One EU body on which we wish to confer privileges and immunities under the clause is the EU Satellite Centre, which provides valuable satellite imagery analysis, helping the EU to monitor crises across the world. The Satellite Centre was established by a Council joint action in July 2001 pursuant to Title V of the Treaty on European Union. The joint action establishing the Satellite Centre is based not on the provisions of the original Title V in the Maastricht Treaty, but Title V as amended by the Amsterdam Treaty. To delete,
could therefore render the clause meaningless. To ensure that we have good and clear legislation, we need to ensure that both the Amsterdam Treaty and the Treaty of Nice, as well as the Maastricht Treaty, are covered by the clause. The Government therefore consider it essential to retain,
and cannot for that reason accept the amendment.
I appreciate the important questions raised by noble Lords in this short debate that bear on how we understand the whole of the matter, and I would like to try to deal with them. I shall start with the noble Baroness, Lady Rawlings, and perhaps the most fundamental question of the debate. It was on the fact that the constitutional treaty might, if carried by Parliament, in due course replace the Maastricht Treaty rather than amend it. I confirm that,
will not cover the constitutional treaty, if it ever enters into force. The process is separate and distinct, and Parliament will be where the Treaty on European Union will be discussed, freestanding of anything that the Bill attempts to do. I want to deal with that as clearly as I can.
We have rightly been asked further questions by the noble Baroness on the legal personality of the bodies set up under the EU, bodies set up by an entity that itself does not have a legal personality—that point was well made. The bodies need legal capacity, privileges and immunities to operate. Once we have agreed to Council decisions or other measures to establish the bodies, the UK is under an obligation to confer the powers under international law. The fact that the EU does not have a legal personality, except to the extent that it concludes agreements pursuant to Articles 24 or 38 of the Treaty on European Union, is immaterial to that fact. The agreements made, and only those agreements, are the bases on which we proceed.
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At the moment, six bodies have been established by the EU under the Treaty on European Union. They are: Europol; Eurojust; the Satellite Centre, which I mentioned; the Institute of Security Studies; ATHENA, the financing mechanism; and the European Defence Agency. Only three of those bodies are relevant to the Bill, where existing legislation does not allow us to meet in full the commitments that we have made on the necessary privileges and immunities. Those are the Satellite Centre, the Institute of Security Studies and ATHENA.
There are 19 agencies of the European Community. Granting privileges and immunities to those agencies is covered by the European Communities Act 1972. Community agencies are distinct from the Community institutions, such as Council, Parliament, Commission and so on, due to their own legal personalities. That constitutes the distinction; one set has their own legal personalities, and the others are set up by secondary legislation to accomplish a wide range of specific technical, scientific and managerial tasks specified in relevant Community Acts. That is why the two sets are different.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, asks where we are going with all this. I do not want to paraphrase his point unfairly—if I do, no doubt he will correct me in any event—but, broadly speaking, we in Europe live in democratic states. Although it is not the case that there are no other democratic states elsewhere, a great many of the treaties, obligations, privileges and immunities that flow from them were constructed when there were many conflicts between states. Many of the states in conflict were not democratic or modern in the way that we understand the terms.
It may not be appropriate in Committee to enter into the broader, philosophical argument, but I want to make an observation, and I hope that it might become part of our debate in due course. We would not serve ourselves well if we began to treat our international obligations as essentially two-tier, those tiers being obligations with states that we regard as very like us, and those with states that we think poor or inferior compared with us. I am not making a distinction between Europe and everywhere else, but one between one might be a rather Euro-centric view and a view about what is happening in the rest of the world.
As the Bill shows—it can be seen elsewhere—we have tried to treat our international obligations in a way that expresses a relatively level view of our expectations about the nature of mutual obligations between states, rather than some of them having the imprint of being okay with us, and others the imprint of being second-rate or inferior. I make that general point because several of the arguments that have flowed about how we might distinguish between different arrangements could lead to a two-tier or multi-tier system of dealing with international obligations.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, also asked more specifically whether the Bill conferred diplomatic immunity on organisations or individuals concerned.
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It does not, but it enables the conferral of privileges and immunities by an Order in Council. Those are necessary for us to fulfil our international obligations. The privileges and immunities that we confer on international organisations is much less in extent and scope than the privileges and immunities enjoyed by diplomats. In that, the noble Lord himself pointed out that there were differences in application; I simply confirm that his proposition is accurate.
I shall turn to the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson of Rannoch. He made them in a question, and I shall deal with only the question that he specifically asked, although I know that there were two Questions, to which replies have been given by the Government.
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