Saturday 4 September 2010

Gerard on the EU Police State!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Gerard rocked them at the conference!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He looked lovely in that pink suit. He was the darling of the conference!!!!We told him he would!!!!!!!!!!!Here is his speech!!!!!!!


Good morning ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your warm welcome. I am not going to use this opportunity to promote my candidature for UKIP’s leadership. As most of you will know I stood in last year’s contest and I came second after Lord Pearson. I have declared my intention to stand this time and I will tell you my programme at the appropriate time and place.

What I will do now is to tell you about how the European Union is creating its own system of criminal law. The EU is in the process of creating its own police-state.

Some people on our side of the anti-EU argument sometimes see Britain as a hapless victim of the European Union. The EU does bad things to Britain and our Governments are somehow hoodwinked or outwitted by perfidious EU officials at each new stage of the integration process. This is simply not true. Successive British governments have been willing participants, and indeed prime movers in driving forward the whole process of creating what is effectively a United States of Europe.

I won’t detail here the betrayal of Britain by every Conservative Government since 1972 in moving forward the EU’s agenda while pretending to do the opposite. Let it suffice to say that at any stage of the process Conservative Governments could have withheld their consent from the Treaties and prevented the massive transfer of powers to the EU. They could have stopped the EU in its tracks. Instead they oiled tracks pointing in the direction of ever closer political union.

The Labour Governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown merely carried forward the process mapped out by the Tories to its intended and logical conclusion. Under Labour giant strides were made to transfer more powers under the Amsterdam and Nice Treaties and pave the way for a final European Constitution.

We all know what happened to the Constitution and it was replaced by a 99% the same, but somehow different, Lisbon Treaty. Our current situation is of course that over 80% of our new laws now originate in the institutions of the EU, it controls most of the major areas of policy, and Britain is well on the way to its intended status of a mere Region of the European Union.

There is a process of harmonisation and integration at work in every important area of policy. In my first term as an MEP I sat on the European Parliament’s Security and Defence Committee. I opposed and warned against how our armed forces are being gradually subsumed into what is eventually intended to become common European armed forces under the direction of the Lisbon Treaty’s, Common Foreign Security and Defence Policy.

In my second term I am a member of the misnamed Civil Liberties Justice and Home Affairs Committee. Here we see clearly how a common European system of criminal law is being created and how our ancient and precious freedoms and protections under English law are being destroyed. Again, I shall oppose it at every step of the way and in the near future I intend to publish a booklet detailing exactly what is happening.

The process of creating a common European legal system is of course long and complex and I can give only a brief overview and summary here.

In October 1999 in Tampere in Finland a summit of the European Council decided to create an area of so-called ‘freedom, justice and security’. The British Government’s representative might have pointed out that we already enjoyed one, but never mind nothing was to stand in the way of the harmonisation of our legal systems.

The Tampere summit decided the milestones needed to create an EU system of criminal law. Key to this is, was the doctrine of ‘mutual recognition’ of judicial decisions. This is the fiction that says that all the judicial and legal systems of member states are equally valid merely by virtue of their being members of the European Union. So a decision taken by a court in Romania or Bulgaria for example is as equally trustworthy as one taken in the Old Bailey. To deny it would probably result in an accusation of xenophobia.

The Tampere programme also set up mechanisms for greater so-called ‘co-operation’ between member states in criminal matters; to extend the powers of Europol, the EU’s nascent police force; and to abolish formal extradition between member states and fast-tack the extradition of criminal suspects.

Interestingly one of the bodies set up under Tampere was a European Police College, situated in Hampshire, to train senior European law enforcement officers. The new Director of the College is a Hungarian, Mr Ferenc Banfi. He reportedly wants to see the creation of a European-wide FBI style police force.

Mr Banfi was a member of the Hungarian Communist Party and a policeman under their murderous communist regime. Speaking of Europol he reportedly told the Daily Express on 29th August that, “It is only a question of time before Europol will have executive powers; it maybe five or ten years but it will happen”. Europol doesn’t yet have the power to arrest anyone directly but Mr Banfi thinks they soon will, and he’s an expert so we should pay attention. Remember that under Europol’s legal basis its officers have almost complete immunity from anything they do or say in the course of their duties. A privilege not even extended to the Soviet Union’s NKVD during the height of Stalin’s terror.

The excuse given for all this is the need to combat the ever present threats of terrorism and organised crime. These threats exist of course but our vulnerability to them is often in no small way a consequence of our membership of the European Union. The loss of control of our own borders has resulted in an influx of vicious organised criminal gangs from Eastern Europe and elsewhere. We now have slavery on British soil for the first time in more than two hundred years because we cannot exclude people smugglers slave-masters from entering Britain. If they are EU citizens they have a perfectly legal right to come.

But is it typical of the European Union that having created a problem it says that the only way to solve it is to give itself even more power.

Now let me tell you how the creation of this now system of criminal law affects us directly. First there is one important point to emphasise in comparing English and continental legal systems. Under the English system sufficient evidence has first to be gathered by the police before a charge can be laid. And under Habeas Corpus the accused must be brought before an open court to be committed for trial.

Under continental systems a Magistrate may remand a defendant in custody on the strength of an accusation alone while an investigation is carried out. This investigation may take months or years while the accused languishes in prison. It may or may not even result in a charge being made, let alone a trial.

The European Arrest Warrant became law in January 2004. I wrote a short pamphlet about this in 2005, and I am sorry to say all the dangers I warned of have been exceeded in practice.

Under a European Arrest Warrant the extradition of a British subject has been reduced to a mere bureaucratic formality. Under an EAW there are thirty-two categories of offence. Some of these are not even specific offences under English law. For example you can be accused of corruption and swindling. Well many of us might take the view that many members of both Houses of Parliament are corrupt swindlers but under English law unless they are charged with a specific offence they are safe from prosecution.

Not so under an EAW. Provided that the paperwork has been correctly completed and minimal information given about the alleged offence, then no prima facie evidence can be considered by the court requested to rubber-stamp extradition.

This Ladies and Gentlemen is the crux of the matter. The court granting extradition has no right or power whatsoever to consider the evidence against the accused person and in order to satisfy itself that there is a proper case to answer. They have almost no power to refuse extradition. Indeed even the Home Secretary has no power to intervene, as they once had, even if it is glaringly obvious that a grave injustice is being done. Extradition has been reduced to the mere export of the carcases of accused persons.

And there is much more to come. On the 27th July the Coalition Government announced that it was opting-in to the European Investigation Order. This new measure is intended to allow any EU member police force to require a British police force to investigate and gather evidence against a British citizen on its behalf, even if the alleged offence is not a criminal matter in the UK.

The British police could be required to carry out surveillance, interview suspects or witnesses, obtain information or intercept telephone and email communications and monitor bank accounts; they could be required to obtain and analyse DNA or fingerprints and send the information to foreign police forces. The British police would have no power to refuse.

The current Coalition Government could easily have declined to opt-in to the European Investigation Order but instead they heartily embraced it. The Home Secretary, Theresa May said that the Government had opted-in because, “we have the opportunity to influences its precise outcome”. This is not true. We cannot precisely influence the outcome because it will be decided by a Qualified Majority Vote and we cannot then opt-out even if we want to.

The next step on the agenda is that of Trials in Absentia. Under an EU Framework Decision Trials in Absentia must be transposed into UK law by 2011, or 2014 at the latest. This will mean that a British citizen can be tried in their absence in another EU country and if found guilty the British police will have to arrest them so they can be dispatched to the member state concerned.

The convicted person cannot argue that they did not return to the relevant country because they did not trust the legal system, in let’s say Romania or Bulgaria, to give them a fair trial, or that the charges against them lack evidence, or were fabricated or corruptly laid. Under the principle of mutual recognition all EU legal systems The British court will have no power to protect them.

Now I may appear to be picking on Romania and Bulgaria but with the best will in the world we cannot accept that their police, judicial and legal systems are up to same standard as ours. Bulgaria is widely accepted as being institutionally corrupt and where the government is largely in the hands of organised crime. But never mind, they are an EU member and they have signed the European Convention on Human Rights so as far as our Government is concerned everything must be OK.

Lastly we have the Framework Decision on the mutual recognition of Financial Penalties and Confiscation Orders. This means that member states can impose fines on other states citizens, and the fine will have to be collected by the home state of the offender. The offences include road traffic offences down to a level of €70. So our old friends the Bulgarians, or any other EU state, can require the British authorities to collect fines from British citizens, and again and it’s no use appealing to a British court if an injustice is being done.

The creation of a European system of criminal law is well under construction. It is taking shape with: a European Public Prosecutor; Europol, its own police force; the Euro Gendarmerie, its own paramilitary police force; the European Investigation Order compelling British police to investigate their own citizens on behalf of foreign states; the European Arrest Warrant enabling citizens to be transported across borders with the minimum of fuss; and the ability of one state to collect fines and confiscate assets across borders. If this doesn’t look like the creation of a police state then I don’t know what does.

Let me return to the European Arrest Warrant. Since 2004 there have been over 1,100 people extradited from the UK. Most were foreign citizens being returned to their own countries. Over 100 were British citizens. We know the stories of some of them. They were the ones with articulate and vocal family and friends to speak up for them. What of the ones who had no such champions in their cause? What was the justice of their case? What was their fate? Who knows? The British courts were forced to wash their hands of them. They were consigned like parcels to foreign prisons.

Now let me make it plain that I do not want to protect genuine criminals from justice. But the function of the law and the courts is as much to protect the innocent as convict the guilty. Consigning someone from their own country to face justice in a foreign country is not something that should be done lightly but only where our courts are convinced there is a proper case to answer. They no longer have that power.

I worked closely on the case of Andrew Symeou a 19 year old London man accused of manslaughter in Greece. I was the only London MEP that responded to his family’s pleas for help. I sat in the court listening to his appeal. It was obvious to the Appeal Court Judges that there was no real evidence against him and what there was appeared to be fabricated by the Greek police. But they were powerless to consider it.

They did the only thing that they could which was refer the appeal to the House of Lords on the basis of asking if the apparent fabrication of evidence amounted to an abuse of process of the EAW. The House of Lords, in what must be one of the most despicable decisions in its long history, refused to even hear the case on the grounds it “did not have an arguable point of law of general public interest”. So it became official. The highest court in the land did not think it of general public interest if one of our citizens is consigned to a foreign prison system on trumped up charges.

Mr Symeou was then extradited to Greece where he spent eleven months in remand in the hell-hole prison of Korydallos. A prison cited by Amnesty International as one of the worst in the world for its inhumane conditions. He was only given bail when his trial began and the incompetent Greek court had forgotten to summon the prosecution witnesses. He still awaits trial.

But there is a positive message here as well. UKIP MEPs have been championing these cases and gaining some publicity for them as a result. For example I have also been involved with the case of the so-called Crete Five, five young men accused of serious assault with no real evidence against them. We could not stop extradition but at least they have been bailed rather than consigned to a Greek prison I believe as a result of the publicity and mounting pressure that has been exerted.

Opposition to the European Arrest Warrant and the other legal measures of the EU criminal law system is a concrete way in which UKIP can demonstrate to the public how the membership of the European Union is destroying our country and way of life.

In particular my colleague William Lord Dartmouth has been closely involved with a number of cases in his region and has worked tirelessly on their behalf. Even going so far as to visit two in Hungary and help secure their release of two accused persons.

At this point I want to introduce some victims of the European Arrest Warrant to give first hand testimony.

I would like to invite to the platform, William Dartmouth, Mike Turner, his son Mark Turner and Jason McGoldrick.

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