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HUMPHRYS: This week, Europe's heads
of government are meeting in Finland to talk about new ways of cracking
down on crime and illegal immigration. Sounds fairly uncontroversial,
but it's not. Some of the measures being proposed would include, for
instance, a Europe-wide arrest warrant so you could be arrested in Britain
for an offence committed anywhere on the Continent. As Paola Buonadonna
reports, the worry is that the police and the judges might gain power,
at the expense of the citizen.
NEWS REPORTS: Bridget Seisay has been
convicted of trying to smuggle an illegal immigrant into Britain. She
insists she's innocent, her lawyers say she's the victim of a miscarriage
of justice.
As she was led handcuffed
into court, Bridget Seisay knew this was her last chance to avoid spending
the next three years in prison.
Bridget Seisay was acquitted
after the judge ruled that a proper investigation hadn't been carried out
and the authorities had failed to produce any substantial evidence.
BRIDGET SEISAY: The past seven months have
been a nightmare for me.
PAOLA BUONADONNA: Back together with her young
son and her husband, Bridget Seisay is trying to forget her ordeal. She
was arrested last year leaving Brussels after a chance encounter with a
woman travelling with false documents. Because she is British and not
Belgian, she was repeatedly denied bail.
SEISAY: I feel very cheated and
nothing can undo the damage. I have been separated for seven months from
my family and I thought when I come back things would settle down easily.
I am so unfocussed and I think, and I keep getting the flashback.
HABIB TEJAN: It was a total nightmare,
devastating, especially looking at my little boy waking up at three o'clock
in the morning and saying, "I want mummy."
BUONADONNA: Of course, miscarriages of
justice occur in every country of the European Union. Next week EU leaders
meet in Tampere, Finland, for the first ever summit devoted to justice
and home affairs. But there's concern that there will be to much stress
on tougher law enforcement and stricter asylum rules, and not enough on
ensuring that ordinary citizens can expect a decent standard of justice
anywhere in the Union.
STEPHEN JAKOBI: There are already over
a thousand Britons in the jails of Europe. We must make sure their rights
are respected before we crack down on crime and indeed create many more
Brits in the jails of Europe.
GRAHAM WATSON MEP: I'm afraid that the emphasis
of our social democratic governments is sometimes a little more angled
towards the security side and a bit less towards the side of justice for
the citizen.
CLAUDE MORAES MEP: It is critical to crush crime,
particularly because it knows no borders now, drug crime, pornography,
all sorts of crimes which respect no borders need to be clamped down upon,
and the EU and the integration project is important in doing that.
BUONADONNA: The concerns of EU Governments
are understandable. Cross border crimes, such as drug smuggling, money
laundering and human trafficking are soaring, up until now, the fight against
crime and inducts to justice have remained almost completely under national
control, despite the single market and the single currency.
The Tampere summit will
be a milestone in the EU's approach to justice matters. According to the
newly ratified Amsterdam Treaty, from now on some decisions on police and
judicial corporation and common rules on asylum and immigration will be
drafted by the EU institutions. This is a delicate area which touches
on the sovereignty of all EU countries. Apart from a commitment to fight
money laundering and some talk of strengthening Europol, EU governments
have quite different ideas about how to make progress.
In the fight against crime,
some countries like France, Italy, Spain and Finland, would like to see
a degree of harmonisation of criminal and civil law. And have even called
for an EU Public Prosecutor for certain crimes. Britain prefers to see
mutual recognition of each other's practices and judgements, and even an
EU Warrant of Arrest which would eventually lead to automatic extraditions.
So an EU country investigating
a crime would be able to ask British Police to freeze the British suspect's
bank account, summon him as a witness, or arrest him, and the request would
be automatically granted. Britain could ask the same of other member countries.
MORAES: The problems with mutual
recognition occur when a citizen of the United Kingdom faces a different
legal system in the EU and they may not get the benefits of protection
and justice in another system, or have a similar standard, and when that
happens you can see the weaknesses of the mutual recognition approach.
BUONADONNA: That's one of the reasons why
France argues that for a limited number of crimes, a common charge, joint
investigative procedures and perhaps a harmonised sentencing system would
be better.
ELISABETH GUIGOU: (Interpreted) If you are talking about organised
crime, and I take this case alone, mutual recognition is not enough, because
mutual recognition means that if there is movement between countries, things
take too much time. So in this case I say that we have to ask ourselves
how we can bring the laws closer together and we may want to do this in
other areas. What I would like is for the Commission to be asked to identify
the areas where this is absolutely essential.
ANTONIO VITORINO: I would say that we are not asking
for full harmonisation of penal codes or of penal law, that's out of the
question, but we think that in some very specific areas, for instance,
the trafficking on human beings, of crimes against children, we can see
that there is no reason, nor political, nor philosophical reason, for not
having a common incrimination and common penalties in all member states,
so to show to the criminals that there is no place to hide in the European
Union for those who commit such crimes.
BUONADONNA: Whichever approach prevails,
civil liberties campaigners want reassurances that tougher measures on
crime like the Euro-warrant would be coupled with stronger guarantees for
people who end up in prison abroad. They argue that foreigners often find
themselves discriminated against with inadequate interpretation facilities,
no legal aid and no bail.
WATSON: I think it's very important
that if we're having Euro-warrants, if we're allowing people to be arrested
cross-border, that we also have Euro-bail, that if somebody is arrested
in a country that is not their home, and the offence is bailable they can
serve their bail in their own home country. That would prevent people
being locked up for seven, eight, nine, ten months and more sometimes,
far away from their family and friends, away from a lawyer who speaks their
language and so on.
JAKOBI: We need a Euro-bail system.
under which people can be sent home to await trial and will get bail according
to their own native code.
Nothing has been done about this, and we've been hammering governments
for six years to get something done and even the basic research is not
there.
BUONADONNA: Bridget Seisay said she found
the Belgian legal system confusing, and the interpretation in court was
poor, but her husband and her British lawyer also think that she was targeted
because of her race. Even member states' growing preoccupation with illegal
asylum seekers. They ignored her pleas that her young son would suffer
without her.
TEJAN: A lot of white people have
said to me...."If Bridget had been white this would not have happened,
it would not have lasted this long, and someone would have cleared the
whole issue in a matter of day or weeks, but never months".
BUONADONNA: Tampere will look at the creation
of common EU rules to discourage illegal immigration and rationalise asylum
procedures in the fifteen states. Germany wants to see a more even allocation
of asylum seekers across the EU, but there are concerns that common rules
will turn the Union into fortress Europe and may lower guarantees for people
in genuine need .
WATSON: The main concern is that
governments may be trying to back away from their commitment in the nineteen-fifty-one
Geneva Convention to grant asylum as a human right, and they may be trying
to move the debate a little so that it becomes asylum at political discretion.
That is something I would very much regret and I believe that my committee
would fight very strongly against.
MORAES: When we move towards that
kind of co-operation we need to ensure that that co-operation doesn't just
mean creating a fortress Europe, it doesn't just mean clamping down, although
it's important to ensure that illegal immigration is minimised. It also
means ensuring that common standards apply and that we don't descend into
a downward spiral, so common arrangements yes, but not descending into
a downward spiral in terms of standards for those who are genuinely seeking
asylum across the EU.
BUONADONNA: But the constant pressure on
EU borders symbolised by the mass exodus of Albanians towards the Italian
coast means member states tend to focus on ways of reducing illegal immigration
in bogus asylum seekers. They're all including Britain expecting to agree
to Euro-dac a finger-printing data base of asylum seekers. The Commission
wants this to be accompanied by safeguards.
VITORINO: Europe cannot be the
big brother, European big brother, and so it's necessary to guarantee three
things, judicial review and judiciary control, democratic control and the
function of Euro-dac, and personal data guarantees which means the right
to have access to the files and to correct the files that Euro-dac will
contain.
BUONADONNA: The temporary summit also aims
to create an area of freedom, security and justice for EU citizens, looking
at ways of making it easier for people to obtain justice in cross-border
civil and family law cases. There is also talk of an EU charter of rights
but no agreement or concrete plan on how this would work in practice.
GUIGOU: (INTERPRETED) What we'd like to ascertain is whether
collective rights exist which are not covered by European legislation already
and which we, the countries of the European Union, after all we are rich
nations compared to the rest of the world, would like to see entrenched,
and so we do not want a purely governmental approach.
WATSON: I think what's important
though is what the governments want to do with the charter at the end.
Some of them including the British government are just saying: Well, there
will be a solemn declaration of this charter. My experience is that citizens'
freedoms are not much enhanced by solemn declaration, that unless we write
the charter into the next European Treaty then we will not have the kind
of legal and democratic safeguards that we need.
BUONADONNA: Nobody doubts that something
needs to be done at EU level to crack down on crime and regulate asylum
and immigration. On the other hand legislators are worried that the secrecy
which surrounds the decision making in this area may lead to bad laws.
They want to ensure that the balance is struck between enforcing the law
and upholding the rights of all EU citizens.
WATSON: Up until now all of the
co-operation between governments in these areas has taken place behind
closed doors. The European Commission hasn't had a look in, the European
parliament hasn't had a look in, let alone the press or the public. Clearly
from now on we want to see the European parliament involved, we want to
see governments justify the decisions they are taking in public hearings.
JAKOBI: Let me illustrate the basic
problem we've got. I went to see a Spanish senior civil servant responsible
for the agenda when I was in Madrid in July and we discussed the problem
of legal aid and I asked the question: why is legal aid for civil matters
on the agenda and legal aid for criminal matters off it. And he said,
."Because they are criminals of course". And the real problem is if you've
got the civil servants creating this agenda for prime ministers who are
all so gung-ho law and order they forget that there is a presumption of
innocence.
BUONADONNA: Bridget Seisay says that the
Belgian authorities assumed she was guilty from the beginning. She and
her family suffered a traumatic experience which they would not wish on
anyone.
TEJAN: It's the capital of Europe
isn't it, and for someone to be treated in such an appalling manner in
a country like Belgium just makes you wonder, I mean what's Europe going
to be. I mean what protection are people going to have in Europe?
BUONADONNA: Little Habib doesn't know it
but this is one of the questions the EU leaders are supposed to address
next week in Tampere. The summit will decide what rights he'll eventually
enjoy as a citizen of the Union.
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