Cross-border Crime

Part of 2. Questions to the Counsel General and Brexit Minister (in respect of his Brexit Minister responsibilities) – in the Senedd at 2:48 pm on 6 November 2019.

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Photo of Jeremy Miles Jeremy Miles Labour 2:48, 6 November 2019

Well, I'll reassure the Member that it's exactly that kind of close engagement and involvement into the future with the various Europe-wide law enforcement bodies and agencies—. It's exactly that kind of relationship that I was advocating in that ministerial forum and I and other Ministers have continued to press for in the interim period. As she says, whether it is Europol or Schengen, the SIS II system, whether it is about sharing passenger name records or criminal records, there is a multiplicity of EU-wide law enforcement and security arrangements from which we benefit at the moment, and from which exclusion will have a real impact on us and on our security.

Now, of course, the ambition that the UK Government has is to negotiate the best available relationships with those organisations after Brexit. But the reality is that there are several obstacles in the path of those negotiations delivering the same level of engagement and involvement that we currently have, not least amongst them the question of the UK's data adequacy. All of this is shared data, and, as we know in this Chamber, if we become a third country, we'll have to restart a process of qualifying to access data of any sort. It's a major stumbling block. As a non-Schengen third country our access to a number of these arrangements will, even at best, be depleted.

And there's a third dimension here as well, which is that many of them require a level playing field in terms of human rights protection, and losing the benefit and the shelter of the EU charter and fundamental rights may itself pose an obstacle to getting the kind of arrangements we would want to see in place in those negotiations.