The Home Secretary made an announcement to Parliament on 9 July on the UK’s policy towards Justice and Home Affairs in the EU.
There’s a lot of law and jargon involved, but I’ll try and keep it as simple as possible!
The bottom line is the UK government remains committed to working with EU partners to advance and protect shared interests in the JHA area.
The EU Treaties require the UK to decide by the end of next year which of the JHA measures currently in force it wants to take part in. If it doesn’t want to take part in all of them it needs to “opt out” of them all and then opt back in to those it wants to rejoin. That requires the European Commission and in some cases other EU states to agree.
Our Ministers have decided on the list of measures they want to continue taking part in, such as Europol and Eurojust and the Prisoner Transfer Framework. The measures cover co-operation in a range of areas, including to support the Schengen arrangements, even though we’re not a member of Schengen.
We will also use UK legislation to improve the working of the European Arrest Warrant. We think this is an important tool, but, like other countries, we have some concerns which we need to address, through our own laws and in the longer term working with others on reform, to make sure it works better.
The package of measures we want to continue working in represents all the key measures which we believe are important in maintaining the excellent co-operation between the UK and Sweden and to support practical co-operation between the Member States more generally, to combat cross border crime and to keep our countries safe.
It reflects a lot of discussion with EU partners and with the EU institutions and those discussions will now continue.
Our aim is to have all the necessary agreements in place in good time next year, so we can continue both to carry out the essential co-operation against crime, but also to work together to reform how the EU works so that our co-operation becomes even stronger and more relevant to the challenges we face today.