Ministry of Justice measures in the JHA block opt-out

This report deals with the sixteen Ministry of Justice measures which form part of the so-called JHA block opt-out. It is the Committee’s response to the House’s invitation to it, together with the Home Affairs and European Scrutiny Committees, to submit a report relevant to the exercise of the opt-out by the end of October 2013, before the start of negotiations between the Government and the European Commission, Council and other EU member states on measures which the UK wishes to rejoin following exercise of the block opt-out.

The UK’s right to exercise a block opt-out, and the conditions attached to the exercise of that right, are contained in Article 10 of Protocol 36 annexed to the EU Treaties. The block opt-out covers those EU police and criminal justice measures which had been adopted prior to 1 December 2009, the date of the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon.

Our report considers the background to the exercise of the opt-out, the context and reasoning behind the Government’s approach, and the process of discussion which has taken place so far between Parliament, its committees and the Government on the subject.

Referring to the delays we and other committees have encountered in obtaining information from the Government to enable us to carry out effective scrutiny, we criticise the “cavalier fashion” in which Parliament has been treated. We also call on the Government to provide an assessment of the effect of the extension of the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union over the measures.

The Ministry of Justice measures include six mutual recognition measures, on financial penalties, previous convictions, prisoner transfer, probation measures, judgments in absentia, and the European Supervision Order. Some of these measures are related to the European Arrest Warrant, which the Government is seeking to rejoin with some modifications to its operation to make it more workable. The Government proposes to seek to rejoin all these instruments except that relating to probation measures, arguing that there are concerns over how it might operate arising from vagueness of drafting. Subject to the fact that we do not have a full impact assessment on all the measures, and the fact that we have had limited time to conduct this scrutiny exercise, we broadly consider that on balance the Government is right to seek to rejoin the five measures. We say that we would not wish to rule out participation in the Probation Measures Framework Decision if concerns about its drafting can be overcome as part of the forthcoming negotiation process.

There are six “minimum standards” measures setting out EU-wide minimum penalties and sanctions for various offences, such as counterfeiting of the euro or corruption of officials, which the Government does not propose to rejoin. We note that the UK already meets all the standards concerned, and conclude that the arguments for opting into these measures are “primarily symbolic”, and those arguments do not “outweigh the disadvantages of bringing wide areas of criminal justice in the UK unnecessarily into the jurisdiction of the Court of Justice of the European Union”.