Thoughts from an active pensioner who is now somewhat past his Biblical "Use-by date"

"Why just be difficult, when with a little more effort you can be bloody impossible?"



Friday 28 December 2012

European Justice

The Telegraph reports (here) that
Europe’s most senior justice official has warned that David Cameron's “crazy” plan to repatriate powers from Brussels will allow paedophiles and criminals to run free if Britain opted out from 135 EU crime and policing laws.

It seems that according to Viviane Reding, the vice-president of the European Commission, if we opt out of these EU laws we will have criminals and paedophiles running around freely on the streets. 
She is the second most senior person in the EU, and in spite of her position, it doesn't appear that she can see the total illogicality of what she says. She fails to explain why this should happen which is probably as well as there is no reason why it should.

If you follow her argument through to its logical conclusion, there must be huge numbers of criminals from, say, the United States running around Europe and similar numbers of European criminals running about the US, which is blatantly untrue. One assumes the Federal police in the US and their equivalent in the EU exchange details of criminals as a matter of routine, and all this without the US being a member of the EU. In case she hasn't heard, it is possible for countries to have bi-lateral agreements on matters of mutual interest. Perhaps she doesn't know, but Interpol existed long before the EU and was quite effective if you took into account the various countries' differing legal systems.
Or is she implying that if Britain withdrew from these 135 EU crime laws (seemingly it is all or nothing), that in retaliation, the EU would not be prepared to negotiate on a replacement bi-lateral agreement covering areas of mutual interest?

In practice the existing arrangements seem to have been of little advantage to the UK, we still seem to have huge numbers of criminals coming into the country, mainly, but not exclusively from the Eastern European countries, and the laws seem to have done nothing to help us to keep them out.

Once again, it seems to me that those at the top of the EU are scaremongering; the specific mention of "criminals and paedophiles" as if later were something special in addition to the criminals, strikes me as an attempt to grab headlines rather than to logically debate the issue. 

The sooner that we ore out of the EU the better.

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