UK will regain power to deport
Britain to ditch EU charter of rights that helps foreign criminals stay as Davis vows to take back control
BRITAIN began to take back control from Brussels yesterday as David Davis said that the first EU law to be scrapped after Brexit would be the one that helps criminals avoid deportation.
Revealing details of the forthcoming Great Repeal Bill, Mr Davis told MPs that the controversial Charter of Fundamental Rights would be dropped on the day Britain left the EU.
There were cheers as the Brexit Secretary announced that Britain would be regaining the sovereignty it last enjoyed in 1972. He said: “A strong, independent country needs control of its own laws. That process starts now.”
A day after Theresa May invoked Article 50, EU leaders reiterated their refusal to discuss a trade deal until the UK had paid its “divorce bill”.
François Hollande, the French president, told Mrs May in a phone call that Britain must agree to meet its “obligations” first, while senior EU officials said it was “highly unlikely” the other 27 member states would give ground.
Meanwhile, Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, voiced a new tactic to frustrate Brexit by threatening to veto the Great Repeal Bill in the Scottish parliament.
Mr Davis published a 37-page White Paper on the objectives of the Bill, which will convert EU laws into UK laws on the day Britain quits Europe, enabling Parliament to choose which laws it wishes to retain.
Mr Davis said the Bill would “provide clarity and certainty for businesses, workers and consumers”.
It will repeal the European Communities Act 1972 – which provides the legal underpinning of Britain’s EU membership – on the day Brexit takes effect in March 2019.
Mr Davis said that doing so “enables the return to this Parliament of the sovereignty we ceded in 1972 and ends the supremacy of EU law in this country”, ensuring that “power sits closer to the people of the United Kingdom than ever before”.
Sir Bill Cash MP, chairman of the European scrutiny committee, said Britain would immediately benefit when the Charter of Fundamental Rights was dropped because “it provides protection for people who have no right to be protected”.
He said: “There is a disproportionate number of those in prison convicted of crimes which warrant deportation who, by virtue of human rights legislation, including and in particular the consequences of the charter, are not able to be deported because of case law.”
The charter has also been used as the basis for a so-called “right to be forgot- ten”, with criminals using the courts to force Google to block searches about past convictions.
Britain will still be a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is not part of EU law.
Writing in today’s Daily Telegraph, John Longworth, former director-general of the British Chambers of Commerce, urges the Government to cut a swath through EU red tape by setting up a “Star Chamber” of MPs, economists and businessmen who are “not frightened to think the unthinkable”. He says the process needs to start now, so that EU laws can be revoked on Brexit day plus one.