Ministers must decide as a matter of urgency how to maintain maximum UK involvement in EU anti-terrorism, intelligence and security policies after recent events in Germany, France and Belgium, the chairman of the home affairs select committee has said.
Labour MP Keith Vaz told the Observer he had written to the new home secretary, Amber Rudd, asking her to appear before the all-party committee because “after the Munich attack and other attacks across Europe, it is even more important that these relationships continue.”
Vaz said the committee would launch a major inquiry in September, as soon as parliament returned after the summer break, into the “Brexit implications” for security and anti-terror policies.
It would be vital, he added, that UK involvement in Europol and access to European criminal data bases, as well as participation in the European arrest warrant, continued until – and to as great a degree as possible, beyond – the time Britain left the EU.
The prime minister, Theresa May, stressed in a speech before the referendum that the UK was safer as a member of the EU because of EU cooperation in tracking down terrorists and international criminals.
On UK participation in the European arrest warrant, May said: “It has been used to get terror suspects out of the country and bring terrorists back here to face justice. In 2005, Hussain Osman – who tried to blow up the London underground on 21/7 – was extradited from Italy using the arrest warrant in just 56 days. Before it existed, it took 10 long years to extradite Rachid Ramda, another terrorist, from Britain to France.”
But unless a special new arrangement can be forged, the UK participation will be weakened.
In the same speech, May praised an EU directive which gives police and security services access to information held in other member states about the movements on flights of terrorists and organised criminals. “Most importantly, this agreement will make us all safer. But it also shows two advantages of remaining inside the EU. First, without the kind of institutional framework offered by the European Union, a complex agreement like this could not have been struck across the whole continent, because bilateral deals between every single member state would have been impossible to reach.”
Vaz said his immediate concern was that the UK had to opt in to a revised deal on how Europol, the EU’s criminal intelligence agency, is run if it is to retain its involvement and keep key UK staff at its headquarters in The Hague, beyond May next year. The director of Europol, Rob Wainwright, is British.
Vaz, who also warned before the referendum of serious security implications for the UK in the event of Brexit, said: “Theresa May knows how important this is but she put off a decision to opt back in to the new Europol structures as home secretary, saying this could be done later. This is now urgent. If we do not opt in by January, the UK will cease to have any involvement and its staff will have to leave by May next year. Then we will have a weaker relationship even than the US, which has its own relationship with Europol.
“After what has been happening across Europe, it is essential that we keep our counter-terrorism links with the EU.”
Rudd was a leading light on the remain side during the referendum campaign and will now have to negotiate with the UK’s EU partners about the links a country outside the union can maintain.
May added in her speech in April that the benefits were beyond question. “In the last year, we have been able to check the criminal records of foreign nationals more than 100,000 times. Checks such as these mean we have been able to deport more than 3,000 European nationals who posed a threat to the public. The police will soon be able to check DNA records for EU nationals in just 15 minutes. Under the old system it took 143 days.”
A government source said detailed discussion within government on how to proceed would be taking place in the coming weeks and months.
