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Police and Justice Bill

The American jurisdiction has a concept of cruel and unusual punishment. Having listened to the Minister for the past 45 minutes, I sympathise. First, I want to tackle head on a mistake that the Minister allowed to emerge from her speech when she cited section 71 of the Extradition Act 2003 and tried to gain support from that provision for the assertion that the concepts of information and evidence were precisely the same. Either she does not understand section 71, or she has misread it. A careful or, indeed, cursory reading of the provision makes it clear that evidence and information are wholly different concepts and that they are applicable in different jurisdictions. Evidence is what we have to show to the United States, while information is what the United States has to provide to our courts. The two concepts are not the same and the 2003 Act does not say that they are, so it was wrong of the Minister to mislead the House, albeit unwittingly, by saying that they were similar concepts.