The Minister of State, Home Office ()
(Con):
That this House do agree with the Commons in their Amendments 1
and 2.
1: Clause 2, page 1, line 16, at end insert “, but paragraph 3A
of the Schedule may not be commenced so as to come into force in
relation to a territory before that territory is a category 2
territory for the purposes of the Extradition Act 2003.”
2: Schedule, page 3, line 22, leave out from beginning to end of
line 24 and insert— “(3A)
The “designated authority” is the National Crime
Agency.
(4) The Secretary of State may by regulations amend this section
so as to change the meaning of “designated authority”.”
...Amendment 2 specifies that the National Crime
Agency is to be the designated authority for this
legislation and provides a power to change the designated
authority by regulations in the future. The designated authority
is the agency that will have the task of “certifying” the
international arrest alerts that conform to the criteria for
carrying out the new power of provisional arrest. We have taken
this approach as a direct alternative to using secondary
legislation on this occasion. The amendment therefore represents
a change of process, not policy, and noble Lords will recognise
that it is being made in response to pressures on parliamentary
time...
...Throughout the passage of this Bill, the NCA,
as the UK’s National Central Bureau for Interpol, has been
identified as the designated authority and has the need for a
regulation-making power to change that, if necessary, in the
future. This ensures flexibility for changing circumstances or
alterations to the functions or titles of law-enforcement bodies
in the UK, such as the NCA in this
context...
(CB) [V]: My Lord, I welcome Commons Amendment 2, designating the
NCA in statute for essentially the reasons that
the Minister has just given...
(LD): My Lords, I shall first acknowledge that the
noble Baroness the Minister has a script that she is obliged to
follow. As the Minister has said in her introduction, this Bill
gives the police the power to arrest somebody who is wanted in
another country, without the need to apply to a court for a
domestic warrant before the arrest can be made, provided that it
is a trusted country and the National Crime
Agency has verified that the foreign request to make the
arrest is necessary and proportionate...
...This sounds to me like a process that could be quicker
than the one proposed by this Bill, where the
NCA has to certify the request to make an
arrest...
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