Letter: Body of law

Sir: Lawrence Boxall (letter, 30 July) suggests that the Britain in Europe group should be informing the public about the alleged threat to habeas corpus etc posed by the report on corpus juris. But this threat is a figment of the imagination, one of the many lies peddled by the UK Independence Party during the European election campaign.

Corpus Juris is the title of a report by a group of international lawyers, concerned solely with measures designed to combat financial fraud in the spending of the EU budget. The onus at present lies on individual member states to prosecute in cases of fraud, and the substantial difference between their legal systems leads to great inconsistencies in the way in which this serious problem is tackled. The lawyers were asked by the European Commission to suggest ways of overcoming this problem.

The report does not touch on the civil liberties of individual citizens in member states. For the avoidance of any doubt, however, it is categorically stated that all the normal legal standards set out in the European Convention on Human Rights and the UN International Covenant on civil and political rights must be maintained. Britain, like our fellow members of the EU, has signed both of these conventions.

One would have thought that Mr Boxall and his fellow anti-Europeans would welcome stronger measures to combat fraud.

MARY WANE

Windermere, Cumbria