Deputy Brian Swift was in possession. The Deputy has 21 minutes.
Private Members' Business. - District Court Extradition Procedures: Motion (Resumed).
The following motion was moved by Deputy S. Barrett on Tuesday, 21 June 1988:
That Dáil Éireann calls on the Government to review extradition procedures in the District Courts and in particular, to consider legislation to transfer cases brought under the Acts from District Court to Circuit Court.
Debate resumed on amendment No. 1:
To delete all words after "Dáil Éireann" and substitute:
"calls on the Government to review the provisions of the Extradition Act of 1965 and in particular, to consider whether in any proceedings under that Act, where the person arrested does not acquiesce in the making of such extradition order when brought before the District Court, the hearing of all matters relating to the making of such order should be before the High Court".
—(Deputy Colley.)
I would like to give 15 minutes of my time to Deputy Roche, with your permission.
Is that agreed? Agreed.
I was talking about the British gutter press which reacts so viciously and unjustifiably to matters Irish. There seems to be a measure of agreement on this point. If that is the case, should we ever respond to them by changing part of a tried and trusted system of justice? In many areas of our law we have been steadily passing more responsibility to our district justices. We have raised the monetary jurisdiction substantially in the District Courts in the past few years. More importantly, we have given them jurisdiction over cases where formally they had none and people were obliged to go to the High Court or the Circuit Court.
One obvious example is in the area of family law where questions of custody and access to children are decided in the District Court. This is a definite trend. If a district justice can decide the fate of families in relation to who has custody of their children, why can that district justice not decide extradition applications as they have been satisfactorily doing for 20 years or more? Some people say, or at least hint, that district justices might make mistakes in certain cases. I would like to remind the House that mistakes are made in many forums from time to time. How many mistakes were made by senior British police officers and senior British superior court judges in the Birmingham Six case, the Guildford Four case and many other cases involving Irish people? I would prefer to be before an Irish district justice than the entire House of Lords.
The business of our law in this area is to administer justice. Justice may well require the punishment of offenders. There is nothing wrong at any stage in giving consideration to present procedures as long as the object is to improve the quality of justice. It should not be to please or appease the British establishment in any of its forms.
Hear, hear.
A misguided Deputy who calls into question the quality or credibility of Irish justice and who insults us all by saying we are perceived abroad as fellow-travellers of terrorists should first educate herself to the real situation as it exists at home and our undoubted high reputation which was hard earned abroad.
The Deputy might do that himself.
Therefore, in our consideration of present procedures let us be extremely careful not to denigrate the professional expertise of our district justices. Let us jealously preserve the principle that, while everybody is subject to the law and its strictures and must be punished for transgressions, the fundamental aim is the guard the liberty of the citizen and to ensure in all cases that justice is done and is seen to be done.
At the outset, I wish to thank Deputy Swift for his generous agreement to share time with me. There are few matters that are as frequently subjected to distortion particularly, as Deputy Swift has said, in the press of our neighbour and among parliamentarians from that country, than the vexed issue of extradition and its handling in this State. The contribution of one Deputy opposite in this Chamber last night amounted to a semi-veiled attack on the Irish Judiciary. The grotesquely exaggerated views that were put forward by that Deputy on the attitude of the Irish people towards the issue of extradition and towards the reality that lies behind it, the reality of violence, are all the more regrettable because they will be inevitably taken by the gutter press in Britain and by British parliamentarians at some stage in the future to whip us collectively about the head. That speech last night was a regrettable one in that it was a lapse on the Deputy's——
Is the Deputy speaking of my speech?
I am indeed.
It was a pity the Deputy was not here.
I took the trouble of reading through it today and quite frankly——
If you did, you should know there is nothing reprehensible about it.
——it does not stand the test of reading in the cold light of day.
Perhaps the Deputy should read it a second time.
Perhaps the Deputy should be allowed to make his address without interruption.
Arrogance.
Arrogance is something they brought into this Chamber. On the issue of extradition, there is no doubt about where Dáil Éireann stands or where the Government stand. The extradition legislation enacted by the Oireachtas a few months ago makes it clear that there is no wish amongst the democratically elected representatives of the people to allow our country to become a haven for terrorists or violence. In the same legislation, the Oireachtas illustrated the desire to ensure that the rights of every Irish citizen are vindicated and subjected to prudent safeguards in the matter of extradition. That is as it should be.
The Government's position is equally clear. It was outlined in this House in a statement by the Taoiseach on 17 February, and I will precis some of that statement:
Extradition is an issue about which there has been widespread and increasing concern in this country. The major concerns have been that extradition should not be unreasonable or arbitrary and that a person who is extradited should get a fair trial in the requesting country.
The Government introduced the Extradition (Amendment) Act, 1987, to provide vital safeguards for our people in our extradition arrangements with Britain and Northern Ireland. The Taoiseach went on:
I want to give this House a solemn assurance that the new Act passed by the Oireachtas in December last will be strictly adhered to and the safeguards provided for will be fully implemented...
Extradition is a very important instrument in the fight against serious crime and international subversion. Extradition is also an inherent part of the international rule of law as it is applied between civilised and democratic States.
It would not be a solution to anything to allow extradition to remain inoperative. The prudent, practical course is to have extradition but only to have it subject to reasonable and effective safeguards in the interests of Irish citizens.
That view pertains on all sides of this House.
I understand the sub judice ruling will prevent me dealing with the McVeigh case. However, the Government's response to that issue and to its impact on extradition between Ireland and Great Britain, was set out in full in a statement in the House by the Minister for Justice on 14 June. I agree with the views Deputy Swift was putting into the record at the close of his contribution, that a specific instance is a bad occasion on which we should rush into legislation.
Extradition between Ireland and Great Britain did not start in 1987 or 1965, as some of the critics of the legislation would have us believe. It has been a feature of relations between the two States since the second half of the last century. From the birth of the State until the sixties, UK warrants were simply backed in this country without any formality. There are some people who would wish to return to that state of affairs. I have to admit I am not one.
The Quinn case in the early sixties changed matters considerably. The automatic backing of warrants was ended by the Supreme Court ruling in that case. The Extradition Act, 1965, brought in a new order introducing the necessity to take extradition warrants from the United Kingdom before the courts. The interesting point about the 1965 legislation is that it perceives the District Court as the court it chooses to bring the operation of the extradition system to in the first instance. The interesting point about the 1965 legislation is that it followed very closely on a British precedent which sees the equivalent court — the court at Marleybone — as the appropriate court for the initiation of extradition proceedings. I make this point about the British precedent because over the last few days I have heard a number of British parliamentarians "tut, tut" at the idea of extradition proceedings being initiated in our District Court.
On the first point, I believe they have no reason for such reaction. The District Court in general was perceived in Irish law as being the court initially in which extradition proceedings would be initiated and in virtually all cases there can be no faulting of the District Court handling of these matters. The 1965 Act did reserve certain special occasions involving decisions where the nature of a case was in context to be brought to the High Court. The generality of cases were, however, intended by the original 1965 legislation to be dealt with at District Court level — I emphasise at District Court level because we were following the British precedent. From time to time we are criticised for so doing, but that is what we did on that occasion. As contentious cases arose, almost inevitably because of claims that the offences in question were political in their nature, the political plea was put forward and in most serious cases the High Court became involved in appearances in the matter of the extradition warrants. Because of this, one could argue that bringing cases to the High Court has become the effective norm and that there was no major principle involved in introducing a requirement that all cases should originate at, perhaps, High Court level — and that is such a suggestion being made by an amendment here.
The counter argument is that at present a major proportion of the cases on extradition are not contested. It is extraordinary when one looks into this issue that many extradition cases for what we would call the ordinary, run-of-the-mill criminal cases, are not contested. United Kingdom warrants tend to be accepted and there is no need to involve the High Court. Forcing all cases to go to the High Court could involve a degree of incovenience and expense in the non-contested cases.
That is not at issue.
I am making the point that if all cases were forced to go before the High Court, it would involve a degree of unnecessary expense, inconvenience and tying up the court time which is not necessary.
Nobody is suggesting that.
The Deputy chooses to contest what I am saying, but I am only referring to what I have read into the record a few moments ago. To contest every case before the High Court would hardly seem justified. By doing so we could clutter up a court which from time to time has been criticised here and elsewhere because of the slow manner in which it deals with proceedings and because of the backlog of cases.
The alternative would seem to be the Circuit Court. There are some problems with the Circuit Court also. The Circuit Court has a number of pronounced disadvantages. For example, it has a tradition of lengthy vacations, it may be wise that that tradition should be changed. It tends to spend the bulk of its time on civil rather than on criminal matters. For these, among other reasons, I suggest that we need to consider whether the Circuit Court is the more appropriate court to which to refer extradition warrants.
On balance, I have no particularly strong view as to which court the extradition warrants should find themselves in in these issues which are to be contested. I share the confidence of the last speaker in all our courts. They serve us well. I would feel more confident as an Irishman before the most junior Irish court than I would before any of the courts of our closest neighbour.
As I said at the outset, I hope any change in this matter will not be taken as reflection on the District Court. I would like to take this occasion to rebut the accusations that have been made about a district justice recently. I object in particular to arguments made about a District Court justice who was named and whose court was named in the British House of Commons. It is wrong that this should have happened when the people who were arguing that case were not in possession of all the facts. If I misread the speech Deputy Colley made last night or if I have misrespresented it here, I apologise for so doing. When it has been drawn to my attention and I looked at it today I felt, as did many other Deputies, that Deputy Colley was joining those people who would seek to attack a section of the Irish Judiciary in this matter. I accept Deputy Colley's statement that this was not her intent.
Debate adjourned.