Foreign National Offenders
Debate between Damian Green and Malcolm Wicks(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Damian Green
As I explained to the right hon. Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Frank Dobson), it seems slightly perverse for anyone to want to send out a signal that if someone commits a serious crime in Britain, uniquely in the world they will get off with either no sentence or a very short one. We want people to know that if they commit a crime in this country, they will be caught and convicted. If they are convicted, they should serve a proper sentence. Of course it would be preferable if they could serve some of that sentence in their own country, and we have negotiated arrangements to that end with certain countries.
Malcolm Wicks (Croydon North) (Lab)
Following the murder of one of my constituents, and following the murderer’s being sent to prison, it was put to me by other constituents that this man—the murderer—might be a foreign national. I did not know whether that was true, so I wrote to ask the Minister. The Minister replied that he could not tell me and that the only way I could find out was to seek the permission of the murderer—no doubt because of human rights. Is not the Minister’s reply, and this situation generally, total nonsense? Sometimes it is the Member of Parliament who can track such individuals, to ensure that the Home Office is doing its duty.
Damian Green
I rather agree with the right hon. Gentleman. The amount of data protection that Ministers are required to observe may well seem absurd, and I can reassure him that I found it absurd as well. Indeed, those sorts of messages go out to Members of Parliament much less frequently than in the past, because I have changed the system.