This is a Seanad Bill which has been amended by the Dáil. In accordance with Standing Order 103, it is deemed to have passed its First, Second and Third Stages in the Seanad and is placed on the Order Paper for Report Stage. On the question, "That the Bill be received for final consideration", the Minister may explain the purpose of the amendments made by the Dáil. This is looked upon as the report of the Dáil amendments to the Seanad. For Senators' convenience, I have arranged for the printing and circulation of the amendments. Senators may speak only once on Report Stage. I remind Senators the only matters which may be discussed are the amendments made by the Dáil.
Transfer of Execution of Sentences Bill 2003 [Seanad Bill amended by the Dáil]: Report and Final Stages.
Question proposed: "That the Bill be received for final consideration."
This Bill was initiated in the Seanad in December 2003 and completed all Stages in June 2004. Report and Final Stages in the Dáil were completed on 30 November 2005. Two amendments were made by the Dáil in its course of considering the Bill.
Amendment No. 1 resulted in a new section 2 being added to the Bill. This was a Labour Party amendment which I accepted on Report Stage in the Dáil. It entailed an amendment to section 11 of the Transfer of Sentenced Persons Act 1995 to ensure the annual report to the Houses of the Oireachtas, prepared under section 11 of the 1995 Act, also includes details of applications for arrests under the Bill. I was happy to accept this amendment and I commend it to the Seanad.
It is welcome that the Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform adopted a Labour Party amendment on this matter.
Unfortunately what I said in June 2004, at the end of the Bill's passage in this House, is even more apposite. While I welcomed the Bill, I was worried about the transfer of unsentenced persons. Unfortunately, we are still in the same situation to date with certain aeroplanes going through Shannon Airport. At the time, the Minister told me that anyone going through Shannon Airport——
That is not relevant to the Bill.
May I compliment the Minister when he said those prisoners would be covered by the Constitution if they were on such aeroplanes? I sincerely hope the Minister will do his utmost to ensure this. It is extremely gloomy that a year and a half after we last debated the Bill we should be continuing with the same lack of information about what is happening to people who may be going through our country.
Amendment No. 2 relates to section 8(4) as passed by the Seanad. Section 8 deals with situations where the sentencing state requests the Irish authority to arrange for the provisional arrest of a sentenced person, pending submission by it of a formal request. Such a possibility also exists under our extradition law.
Section 8 provides that the High Court can grant an application for provisional arrest. Subsection (4) sets out the powers of remand available to the High Court once the person has been provisionally arrested and brought before it. Initially, it was provided that the person should be remanded in custody pending receipt of the formal request but as a result of the amendment I moved in the Dáil, the court now has the option of remanding the person in custody or on bail.
The amendment aligns the Bill with section 27(6) of the Extradition Act, which also deals with provisional arrest. It has been my policy that, in so far as possible, the arrangements under the Bill should be similar to those which apply in extradition cases. I had already ensured this in respect of the safeguards available to arrested persons when I moved an amendment in this House which inserted section 9(2)(f) into this Bill. This subsection provides that the extensive safeguards available under Part 3 of the European Arrest Warrant Act 2003 are also available to a person who has been arrested under this Bill. The amendment to section 9(4) completes this approach.
The amendment inserted in the Dáil has improved the Bill and I am pleased to commend it to the House.
Question put and agreed to.
Question proposed: "That the Bill do now pass."
The introduction of this Bill was an excellent initiative and a sensible decision by the Minister. There is little point in people from abroad serving sentences here or Irish people serving sentences abroad. The primary purpose of prison must be to rehabilitate prisoners in order that they can take their place in society again. It is considered much better if prisoners serve their sentences close to their abode and family in the hope that they will find some degree of stability when they leave prison, although many prison inmates come from most unstable backgrounds.
I have been asked by prisoners in other countries whether it would be possible to ensure that sentences imposed in other European jurisdictions would be more consistent. I have no expertise in this area but I ask the Minster, who will have his own views on the issue, to keep this request in mind when he meets his ministerial counterparts at European Union level. Sentencing policies vary considerably among judges, as the Minister has noted in the past, and between countries. I compliment the Minister on introducing this Bill, which will be extremely useful.
I, too, commend the Minister on this eminently sensible Bill. With regard to the transfer of sentences, I sought a meeting with the Minister about three weeks ago to discuss the possibility of securing the release on humanitarian grounds of one of my constituents who was serving a sentence in prison in the United Kingdom. I was not aware of the position as regards the possibility of transfer. An official from the Department informed me that the Minister has no jurisdiction in the matter. Fortunately, however, the Department of Foreign Affairs made a helpful intervention.
The UK authorities were less than helpful in the case, which involved the transfer of a young lad whose father was dying. The person in question was eventually released to attend his father's burial but was deported rather than transferred. He had only six weeks left to serve of a 12 month sentence. I am aware that the Department of Foreign Affairs was concerned about the case. These types of issues should be raised with the British authorities, which I expected to be more helpful in cases involving humanitarian issues. It is appropriate to raise this matter during the debate on this Bill, which the Fine Gael Party fully supports. However, other jurisdictions should take humanitarian considerations, such as those I have mentioned, into account.
I join with other Senators in complimenting the Minister. We went through the Bill thoroughly in the past and the amendments that have been made are sensible. While I am sure that judicial discretion will deal with it, I have one slight reservation in that we are probably dealing with people who have absconded from serving sentences in the past. While every effort must be made to rehabilitate people, the deterrent of prison must be there as well.
Recently, I visited Germany and spoke to some people who were knowledgeable about the justice system both there and in Austria. I know the Minister is preparing to tackle the issue of anti-social behaviour, but parental responsibility needs to be exercised in this regard. I understand that in Austria parents can be imprisoned because of their failure to exercise responsibilities and duties concerning their children who behaved in an anti-social manner. We need to push the pendulum somewhat in that direction because too often a laissez-faire approach is taken in society with regard in particular to incorrigible, repeat offenders who commit fairly serious crimes. They can graduate from one form of crime to another. The emphasis should be on rehabilitation, but where people fail to respond to that they should be open to the full rigours of the law.
I support the Bill and agree with the comments by other Senators that the operation of the legislation should be monitored. I welcome the fact that the Minister has adopted a Labour Party amendment.
I also wish to raise an issue that is indirectly related to the Bill. Other speakers have referred to the rehabilitation of offenders, along the lines of measures already introduced in the United Kingdom. I raised this matter approximately two weeks ago with the Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform, Deputy Brian Lenihan. The Labour Party had tabled a motion on young offenders and the Minister of State was supportive of the need for legislation to rehabilitate such people. He said that the Minister, Deputy McDowell, was examining the matter. While the Minister is present in the Chamber, I want to raise the issue with him. Such legislation may not be suitable for all offenders or offences.
However, some people may commit an offence, the record of which they will then carry with them for the rest of their lives. That can affect their employment prospects. Certain offenders should be given the opportunity of rehabilitation through a process that would help them to clear their record, similar to the way it has been done in the UK and other jurisdictions. I hope the Minister will do something about that as soon as possible. I have dealt with such a once-off case where is was definitely out of character for the person to have acted thus. However, that person's career possibilities are now restricted for life, unless rehabilitative legislation is enacted. The Minister should consider introducing such legislation in the near future.
I thank Senators for their kind remarks and for all the work undertaken in considering this Bill at great length before it went to Dáil Éireann. The House will note from the few amendments that were made in the Dáil that the general view in the Lower House was that all the valuable work had been done in this Chamber. Therefore, I wish to thank Senators for having done that work with me.
The Bill deals with situations where a sentenced person has fled from the sentencing state and has returned to his or her state of nationality without having served the sentence. The Bill provides that the sentencing state may request the state of nationality to enforce the sentence. As a result of this Bill, Ireland, as the sentencing State, will be in a position to request other states to enforce Irish sentences in their jurisdictions where the person is a national of that other state and has fled from Ireland without serving or completing a sentence imposed here.
The reverse will also be possible. Ireland will be able to accept requests from other states for the enforcement against Irish nationals who have fled from the sentencing state without serving a sentence imposed there. Needless to say, these arrangements can only operate with states that are also parties to international instruments, to which I have referred, and to which this Bill gives effect in Irish law.
In addition, we are providing in the Bill that these arrangements may operate only where the other state has been designated by the Minister for Foreign Affairs as a state with which we are prepared to operate these arrangements. That is a valuable safeguard. It will be seen that the arrangements under this Bill provide an alternative of kinds, in certain cases, to extradition. These arrangements are beneficial to the sentenced person insofar as they allow service of the sentence in the person's home state, nearer to family and in an environment which will generally be more favourable for that person. However, it is important to stress at the same time that it will also have the effect of ensuring the sentence is served and in that way it will ensure that justice is done.
Senator Henry raised the consistency of sentencing, which is a fraught issue. Even if one were to take the European Union as one's theatre of operations, there are radically different sentencing philosophies across the EU. I am not quite clear in my own mind that the people of Ireland would be prepared to adopt some of the approaches to, say, homicide cases that some other countries adopt in civil law. Likewise, the notion of minimum sentencing is far more common in the civil law system that in our system. We give our Judiciary a broad remit to decide sentences. The disadvantage of that approach is that consistency is difficult to extract from sentencing decisions, but the advantage is that justice is always flexible in respect of each accused person, and one case is not always treated as a precedent for another.
The balance between consistency and individuality is hard to strike. In recent times, however, we have had plenty of examples of major controversy about whether or not a sentence was harsh. That controversy cuts both ways, but we must accord to members of the Judiciary the respect to which they are entitled under the prosecution — that is, that unless they err egregiously it is their job to decide how to sentence, just as it is our job to decide what the law should be. There must be some degree of mutual respect between the pillars of the Constitution in those kind of cases, having provided for the right of the State and the accused to appeal sentences that they consider are wrong in principle or excessively lenient, as the case may be.
Since Senator Henry raised the matter of people in custody travelling through Ireland, I do not want to be struck dumb, however out of order she was. Under our Constitution, there are only two circumstances in which they can be held in custody by any foreign power in Ireland. The first is if they are being extradited and the second is if they are sentenced persons being transferred. Those are the only two situations, so there is no possibility whatsoever for it to be lawful under Irish law for anybody to be brought by a state in some form of informal rendition. It is simply unconstitutional and is not provided for in Irish law.
The Minister should tell that to Condoleezza Rice.
The debate is over.
I have received categorical, unambiguous and absolute assurances from the diplomatic representative of the United States in Ireland that at no time — in the past, present or future — will the United States ever seek to bring a person in custody through Ireland, using any Irish airport, in contravention of our law. These are categorical and unambiguous assurances which I have received and there are no circumscriptions or qualifications to them. In those circumstances, unless evidence was given to me that those assurances were offered in bad faith concerning past, present and future conduct, I find that I should accept them. That is the position of the Government.
Question put and agreed to.