Brian Lenihan Jnr (Dublin West, Fianna Fail)

The amendment proposed by Senator Tuffy's amendment proposes that the full text of the additional protocol and the Schengen Convention should be added as Schedules to the Bill, but we are not giving effect to the full protocol. The protocol contains nine articles and only two contain substantive provisions, namely Articles 2 and 3. Of these, Ireland proposes to operate Article 2 only and in those circumstances it would be inappropriate of the Oireachtas to include as a schedule the entire protocol when we are only giving effect to part of it. In any event, scheduling the protocol when the main convention itself has not been scheduled would seem odd and might lead to confusion as to the exact legal status of these international instruments. Such an outcome would defeat the purpose of the amendment.

Why then are we not scheduling the Schengen Convention, as proposed by Senator Tuffy's other amendment? The Schengen Convention consists of 142 articles and in this Bill we are giving effect to just three of those — Articles 67, 68 and 69, which deal with the transfer of the enforcement of criminal judgments. Ireland is opting into only some parts of the Schengen Convention, such as police co-operation, mutual assistance, criminal matters and extradition. We are not implementing provisions on cross-border hot pursuit, for example. Scheduling the whole convention, including those parts which we will not be opting into, could give rise to considerable legal confusion and that would also defeat the intentions behind the amendment.

What we are doing here is giving the force of law in the State to an international instrument. The Oireachtas could inadvertently give the impression that the entirety of these legal instruments was part of the domestic law of the State, were we to schedule them to this legislation.