Criminals will rejoice if UK leaves EU

Cross-border collaboration is essential to tackle evils and that is possible only by staying within the bloc

In the United Kingdom we have always had international ambitions and international responsibilities. These obviously predate the European Union; we have been trading and doing business in Europe for centuries. But for more than 40 years, our membership of the EU has significantly helped us realise our ambitions and discharge our responsibilities. It has also made us safer.

That the EU is now our biggest trading partner and that EU membership makes us attractive for inward investment is well known. The EU accounts for 44 per cent of UK exports of goods and services and 53 per cent of UK imports. More than 80 per cent of UK firms that trade do business with Europe. Less well known are the arrangements used on a daily basis by our citizens and businesses to form and maintain the different relationships that trading in Europe throws up — business to business relationships, business to consumer relationships and family relationships — and to resolve differences when they arise.

In the past, our citizens and businesses had to rely on often slow and creaking intergovernmental cooperation, including bilateral and multinational conventions; now, they can take advantage of EU civil judicial cooperation measures that are far more effective. Almost everyone with any experience in resolving cross-border civil disputes agrees that a return to the old way of working would very obviously be a retrograde step.

But it is not just business relationships that have become more international. Those in Britain who engage in serious and organised crime do not confine their activities within our borders. They increasingly operate across Europe, using well-trodden routes and criminal gangs.

The tragic events in Paris last November, along with confirmation that seven terror plots had been foiled in the UK in recent months, underline just how important it is that Britain maintains and enhances its capacity to investigate and prosecute those concerned. To counter these threats, Britain’s police and security forces need to be able to act just as quickly and across borders. Information needs to be shared speedily, arrests have to be co-ordinated and a prosecution strategy devised very early in the process. Unless action across Europe is joint action, it can make a bad situation worse, not better. To take an obvious example, if different members of a criminal gang operating in three different countries in Europe are not arrested on the same day at precisely the same time, with a clear plan for subsequent action, it is almost inevitable that those not picked up in the first swoop will not be arrested at all.

That is why all those involved in the investigation and prosecution of serious organised crime have always made full use of available EU police and criminal justice measures, often with very good results. One of the best examples is the case of Hussain Osman, one of the failed July 21 London bombers, who placed explosives at Shepherd’s Bush tube station in 2005 before fleeing to Italy.

Information-sharing

As a result of joint UK-Italian intelligence sharing, joint enforcement action and a European arrest warrant, he was arrested in Rome a few days later by Italian police officers and returned to the UK in 56 days. He was successfully prosecuted and is now serving a 40-year prison sentence.

That is in stark contrast to progress under earlier non-EU arrangements. The return from the UK to France of Rachid Ramda for his part in the 1995 Paris metro bombings took nearly 10 years to agree. The European Police Office, known as Europol, established in 1998, contributes to more than 13,500 cross-border investigations each year.

Four years ago, a UK-led operation involving information sharing and co-ordination across 12 countries dealt successfully with a very large child abuse network. At least 230 children worldwide were at risk, including 60 in the UK, and the operation led to the arrest of more than 180 offenders, 121 of whom were arrested in the UK.

This type of effective collective action — helping to protect UK citizens — would be much more difficult if Britain were outside these collective EU institutions. Alongside Europol, there are EU arrangements for joint investigation teams, which enable police teams in two or more EU countries to team up to carry out criminal investigations, and Eurojust, which is the body responsible for judicial cooperation between EU member states.

No less useful is the European criminal records information system, which allows EU member states to obtain details of the previous convictions of EU nationals. This allows courts to make the right bail decisions, take bad character into account and, on conviction, give sentences that reflect previous offending history. No home secretary would want to have to explain to the family of a victim killed by someone on bail that, had the details of a previous conviction in the EU been available earlier, the suspect would never have been bailed at all.

Just as with the civil cooperations measures relied on by businesses every day, so too with the criminal justice cooperation measures: Almost anyone with experience in fighting crime across borders agrees that a return to the pre-EU slow and creaking way of working would be a big step in the wrong direction.

One of the most important and widely underappreciated benefits of Britain’s membership of the EU is the additional security it provides in the fight against crossborder crime, terrorism, people trafficking and sexual exploitation. In the Strategic Defence and Security Review, signed off by British Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010, the point could not have been made more bluntly: “UK membership of the EU is a key part of our international engagement and means of promoting security and prosperity in the European neighbourhood.”

Britain outside the EU would be less able to respond with the speed and strength it needs to tackle complex and growing cross-border threats. That is why, alongside the business case for staying in the EU, there is a hardheaded national security case for Britain. By flirting with withdrawal from the EU, Cameron is now putting all of this at risk.

Keir Starmer QC is British Labour MP for Holborn and St Pancras.

On the web