The European Investigation Order literally makes my blood boil. It is one of the most illiberal and undemocratic orders issued by the EU, which will squeeze our liberties even further, and surrender more of our sovereignty. We could have opted out of this terrible scheme, we could have stood up for Britain's interests. So what did this coalition government do which promised us that our liberties would be protected, and no further sovereignty would be surrendered to the EU well quite clearly from the message here, they did exactly the opposite, they have opted in to one of the most authoritarian pieces of legislation going and smashed up a key promise of theirs to protect liberty and protect sovereignty.
That we’ve opted can be seen by Baroness Neville Jones in the House of Lords speaking on behalf of the government and Theresa's May statement in the House Of Commons. There wasan option to opt out, but following the British government policy of capitulating to the EU demands it decided to opt in. Apparently if we do not like the policy we can opt out later, but the pessimist in me believe I'll see that happening when pigs fly. When after was the last time a government got powers back from the EU? from my recollection not since the heady days of Thatcher re-negotiating our budget contributions in the mid 1980s.
We have lost even more control of our judicial and police activities to EU member states and in particular other EU member state's police forces where for example in countries such as Bulgaria police brutality is common. So in one full swoop our police activities will become ever more brutal, as they now will be forced to bring in Bulgarian Style Justice, to meet with the requirements of the European Investigation Order. After all when the Bulgarian police order the British Police to investigate a crime, under the European Investigation they will have to. No wonder Fair Trials international is so opposed to the European Investigation Order. Considering the other countries in the EU who have signed up to the European Investigation Order, its hardly going to lead to a less brutal police force and a fairer justice system.
The European investigation order will work hand in hand with the European arrest arrant which came into law after September 11th to supposedly to protect us from terrorists but has actually not protected us from terrorists, but instead undermined many innocent people's rights to a fair trial and protection from extradition. UK citizens can be extradited to other countries to be arrested for minor cases-as happened with Andreas Symou when he was arrested by the Greek authorities for a crime he didn't even commit. Thus showing that this alone had led to massive abuses of the freedoms of British citizens.
The European investigation order takes this even further at a time when we ourselves as the Ian Tomlinson incident showed and the powers given by RIPa to police - worry us that we have given to much power to our own national police, which has led to abuse and a lack of protection of UK citizens from what is becoming increasingly a police state, this makes the situation much worse.
This is because now police authorities from other countries now have these powers, they have the power to spy through our bank statements, to look through other data, and they can do all this by making simple requests of British police which the British police must I repeat must obey, in other words it is an order not a request. There data safeguards are even worse than ours- so there is on a greater scale more chance of our data going missing and our privacy exposed, and further more us the average British citizen not just being spied on by British police but by European police. Truly the next story about Bins and surveillance will be Foreign Police rummaging through our Bins.
In doing all of this we hand over our police and judicial powers to the EU, which has a very bad history of undermining member state's liberties, due to its consistent undermining of sovereignty. The European Investigation Order is an example of this where the EU's attempted harmonisation of police and judicial policy across the EU has put liberty in danger and put values such as innocent until proven guilty into jeopardy.
Apparently this doesn't break the coalition government's non-existent referendum lock, which said if there was any attempt of significant extension of EU powers would trigger it. Theresa May and Baroness Neville Jones had the bare cheek to say to Lords and MPS who opposed the European Investigation Order and thought it was a significant transfer of sovereignty of getting it all wrong and not understanding what the European Investigation Order was about. Im sorry ladies but the problem they know all to well about what the European Investigation is about. Given all this, and that it is a significant transfer of powers to the EU, we should according to the coalition government have a referendum on the subject. I'm still waiting for the referendum, I fear it could be a long wait.
The duplicity goes even further than this I’m afraid though. The government through a House of Lords statement in the 15th of July said they wanted more scrutiny of EU laws etc and EU work, and that it had been lacking in the last parliament. Yet the European Investigation Order has been railroaded through parliament, from orders upon high from our political masters the EU. No proper debate was allowed and there was no vote on such a substantial piece of legislation, even though more time to debate was called for by amongst people like Dominic Raab MP in the house of commons and Lord Stoddart in the house of lords. The coalition government just like New Labour is in danger of saying one thing and doing exactly the opposite.
Oh and all the bureaucracy which will be created will mean that we the taxpayer gets to pay for the privilege of losing our liberties, as the EU will probably say to meet the demands of the European Investigation Order there will have to be an increase in the EU budget and thus our contributions will skyrocket even further.
Supposedly this coalition's government was to stop further powers going to the EU and in fact repatriate powers from the EU to the UK in particular the UK parliament. Additionally the coalition government was supposedly committed to protected UK's citizen’s individual freedoms. In opting into this law, the Coalition has shown that for all their words, when push came to shove, they preferred to let our liberties wither away at the altar of the EU, rather than stand up for the national interest and protect our hard won liberties which has been earned over centuries.
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