Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-11-13-Speech-1-053"
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"en.20001113.5.1-053"2
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"Mr President, I regret that mine will be a somewhat discordant voice in this House tonight, save for that of my colleague, Mrs Boumediene-Thiery. It is, of course, the case that this House has set itself a worthy and good objective. But good ends do not justify any means whatever.
It seems to me that this set of initiatives is going forward in a way which risks setting at naught the protection provided by Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. I do not see adequate account being taken of the right of defence, as Mrs Boumediene-Thiery said. I do not see adequate account of the rights of individuals to a fair trial, to fair presentation of charges before them. Without that, I fear we are creating a Frankenstein’s monster, though we, like Count Frankenstein, seek to do good. We must ensure that as we move towards mutual recognition of judgments we are establishing in Europe the highest common standard, not the lowest common denominator, when it comes to protecting persons brought into the justice system.
As a member of this House, I have had cases brought to my attention. One example is a person on a money laundering charge, held for 364 days in custody in Portugal without any charge being presented. When finally it was presented it was in many pages of Portuguese, with an insufficient English summary translation, even though the person concerned knew no Portuguese. I have come across cases in France of lorry drivers, held on suspicion of drug trafficking – a shocking crime if it has been committed, but these persons are held in unacceptable conditions with no effective right to a defence of their own choosing, with inadequate or no interpretation facilities, with no opportunity to prove their innocence by due process of law in a reasonable time.
While we live in a Europe in which such blots exist on our escutcheons we need to be extremely careful that the steps we are taking for good do not end up destroying civil liberty in some of its most fundamental aspects in Europe. Mr Andrews is right: those heavy penalties ought to fall upon those properly convicted, after fair trial, of offences of the kind we are considering. We must ensure that those who are the innocent victims – the collateral damage I suppose we should call it – of the war upon crime are not left languishing in jails, incommunicado from their families. There is too much of that in our contemporary Europe and before I give my support to a headlong rush to mutual recognition, I would like to see common recognition of fair standards."@en1
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