The Constitutional Treaty – what does it mean in practice?

(1) Making it harder to fight crime

The Constitutional Treaty would give the EU considerable new powers over crime, policing and the law courts.

EU judges would gain power over justice and policing for the first time. The European Court of Justice would become the highest court in the land and would begin to set the UK's substantive criminal law. The Government has admitted that this would be a fundamental transfer of “national sovereignty”.

It would become illegal under EU law to try someone twice for the same crime. This would mean that criminals like Billy Dunlop, who was successfully convicted of murdering Julie Hogg when new evidence came to light 15 years after he was originally acquitted, would not have been convicted.

The Constitutional Treaty also states that “the severity of penalties must not be disproportionate to the criminal offence”, which could undermine the discretion of British judges to keep infamous killers like Rosemary West in jail permanently.

EU officials have already told a BBC reporter that they will use their new powers to pass judgement on the UK’s anti-terror laws. The BBC’s Europe Editor reported: “A Commission spokesman was telling me, “Well we’d want to look at things like Belmarsh, can you hold foreign suspects indefinitely?” The Commission don’t like it, so Britain could get hammered.”

The EU would gain other new powers over criminal justice. The EU’s police force, Europol, would be able to initiate investigations on British soil for the first time, making it more like a European version of America’s FBI.

This could have worrying implications. Unlike British police forces, Europol’s officers are largely unaccountable. They cannot be compelled to testify in court and are immune from prosecution for acts performed in the course of their duties. Europol also has its own problems with corruption – for example its offices were raided by Belgian police as part of a fraud investigation.

The European Prosecutor “Eurojust” will also get sweeping new powers. Johannes Thuy, a spokesman for Eurojust, confirmed that “We could compel the British police to make a prosecution.”