Could Britain’s coalition collapse over EU police co-operation? by Hugo Brady
On May 12th, two European stories dominated the BBC news in Britain. The first concerned a series of statements from Conservative cabinet ministers and grandees that Britain should leave the EU unless it negotiated new terms of membership. The second reported that Spanish police had captured Andrew Moran – a notorious, machete-wielding UK convict – and would return him from his Benidorm hideout to face justice at home. How are the two stories linked? Moran is the 50th high-profile British criminal that Spain has surrendered since 2007 under the European arrest warrant (EAW). The EAW is the cornerstone of a package of 130-odd European laws that has revolutionised police and security cooperation between EU countries over the last decade. Hitherto, Britain’s most wanted criminals lounged in sunny Southern Spain, secure in the knowledge that judicial red-tape or political points-scoring over Gibraltar would keep them from the reach of the UK authorities. Despite these successes, the EAW and accompanying agreements on the sharing of criminal intelligence are now caught up in Britain’s noxious European debate. Prime Minister David Cameron is under intense pressure from over 100 Conservative backbenchers to “get a better deal on Europe”, especially after the UK Independence Party (UKIP) won 23 per cent of the votes in local council elections in May. But Cameron’s chances of securing radical changes to the terms of British membership are slim, given that most other EU member-states have
no intention of allowing Britain to opt out of significant policy areas. However, the Union’s rules on policing and justice, including the all-important EAW, appear to offer Cameron some relief. Uniquely, Britain has the right to ‘repatriate’ such powers before the end of 2014, thanks to a clause that the previous Labour government inserted into the EU’s Lisbon treaty. This gave Britain the right to opt out of all such co-operation agreed before December 2009, and then negotiate with the European Commission, and other EU governments, on opting back into the bits it finds most useful. Cameron could claim a rare political success in the EU by exercising the opt-out and thus help shore up his leadership before the 2015 general election. Britain’s parliament will vote on the justice opt-out before May 2014. But the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg – who leads the Conservatives’ coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats – says that his party will not support a deal that means leaving the EAW. Reluctantly, the Conservative leadership has agreed to this