EU What?

The European Commission today proposes sweeping away national veto rights on sensitive areas of EU law making, involving cross-border police and judicial co-operation.

Franco Frattini, the EU commissioner for justice, freedom and security, is expected to urge governments to end the "stalemate" caused by the need to vote unanimously on areas such as Europe-wide investigations, the "hot pursuit" of criminals across frontiers and the rights of foreign criminal suspects.

The EU becoming more involved in criminal law? Without the national veto? It’s actually long been my biggest concern about the entire project, this whole issue of criminal law.

Yes, of course I think the EU shouldn’t exist and if it does that we shouldn’t be members. But why would I be more concerned about law than economics say, or the idea of being ruled by the Frogs (again!)?

Because the criminal legal system is at the very heart of what makes a free country. We have, over a period of some 800 and a few years (I think the actual date of "time immemorial " in the Common Law is actually 1187 although grateful to be corrected if that is wrong.) built a system based upon a combination of precedent and legislation. The end result might not be perfect but all those things that go to make it up, Habeus Corpus, jury trial, etc etc (you know the litany) are part and parcel of what protects us, the citizenry, from them, the State.

Indeed, most of those protections were introduced entirely to protect us from that State: something many forget, that the limitations on evidence and trials are not to protect criminals, but to protect the innocent from being proclaimed criminals for political reasons.

Our continental friends have very different legal systems. Very different indeed. No juries, to start with. So if we are to have EU wide criminal law, clearly there will be harmonisation. And it doesn’t take intelligence of the genius level to see that when the UK and Eire are on one side, with our own distinctive systems, and 23 are on the other, with their, which way the harmonisation is going to go.

Now we are to have this without a national veto, now it will be the result of majority voting. That will be the end of it, one of the two great inventions of these Isles. The English language will survive but the Common Law legal system will not.

It has already happened to a large extent in commecial law (idiocies like laws detailing the legal ingredients of jam...and yes, carrots are indeed, in law, fruit, jam for the purpose of making...are exactly this, the replacement of simple Common Law provisions with the detailed allowances of the Napoleonic Code) and now it looks like it will happen with the criminal law.

We’ve got to leave.