Detectives from Europe will be able to carry out investigations and even make arrests on British soil as part of specialist squads designed to combat international crime.Members of the European police force Europol – which includes Britain and France – can now form Joint Investigation Teams using officers from each national force.They will include officers from the Metropolitan Police and the Serious Organised Crime Agency and will target criminal gangs. Previously, European police could travel to this country to share intelligence – but could not make arrests. A spokesman for SOCA said: “This is a new step for Britain. It will help us to combat cross-border crime.”But critics are angry that the decision removes Britain’s veto over any future changes to Europol’s powers. Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said: “This is the latest shocking failure to stand up for the British national interest in Brussels. “Responsibility for policing and security must remain in the hands of national governments.”Further background information on Europol, and the system of Law under which it will operate - Corpus Juris - may be found in this short House of Lords article:
I might say by way of prefacing my remarks and introducing myself, that I am a British citizen, I have been living in Italy for the last 38 years, and have been studying the area of comparative criminal justice and procedure for the last 25 years, having been published in various papers and journals and spoken from various platforms from time to time. My name has been cited in debates in the Houses of Parliament four times, in particular in January 2003 when Nick Hawkins MP read aloud a 6-page briefing paper I had prepared on aspects of Italian criminal procedure, in Standing Committee, debating the European Arrest Warrant. In April 1997 I was invited as a guest of the European Commission to a seminar in Spain where they unveiled the Corpus Juris project for a single system of criminal justice to be enforced throughout the EU; subsequently I contributed written evidence to the HoL Report on Corpus Juris (9th Report, 1998-99, HL Paper 62—pp 117-119).
The evidence I wish to submit to you is as follows—very briefly:
(1) The new Reform treaty will ensure that criminal justice is eventually brought under the decision-making powers of the central authorities of the EU, and JHA will lose its present status as an exclusively national prerogative.
(2) There are two broadly, and profoundly, different families of systems of criminal justice in Europe today—the inquisitorial system, prevalent throughout the continent of Europe, and the adversarial system, which is in use only in the “island jurisdictions” of the UK, Ireland, and Malta.
(3) One problem we have is that little is known about continental systems of criminal justice. It is an area that has hardly ever been studied. There are no university chairs of comparative law that specialise in comparative criminal procedure, anywhere in the British Isles.
(4) The proceedings during the seminar in Spain and an examination of the Corpus Juris proposal, as well as the demands put forward by Commissioner Franco Frattini last year, show clearly that there is a firm determination on the part of the EU’s central bodies to set up a single system of criminal justice for the whole of the EU, based on the Inquisitorial model. A very recent report says that Signor Frattini wishes to start enacting those parts of the Treaty concerning security and justice even before it has been ratified
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