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extradition arrangements are contained in the current Criminal Justice Bill. Special provisions were included in the Drug Trafficking Offences Act 1986 and the Criminal Justice (Scotland) Act 1987 to allow for a measure of mutual assistance in the freezing and confiscation of the assets of drug traffickers. In England and Wales the Criminal Justice Bill will enable similar assistance to be given in the restraint and confiscation of the proceeds of other serious offences, as well as facilitating the admission of written evidence from abroad and enabling magistrates' courts and the Crown Court to approve the sending of requests for evidence to other countries. (Similar legislation is planned for Northern Ireland.)
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Nevertheless, legislation already enacted or now before Parliament is not sufficient to enable the United Kingdom to participate in international mutual assistance arrangements of the broad scope outlined in paragraph 2 above. While bilateral co-operation between agencies (for example, police co-operation through Interpol and bilateral Customs co-operation) is recognised to be good, the limited povers available to our courts to give effective assistance to overseas courts and prosecutors fall far short of what the latter could offer us if reciprocity were guaranteed.
United Kingdom policy hitherto
7. Until very recently the united kingdom's polley on E agreements for mutual assistance in criminal matters was that such arrangements were in general unlikely to be of significant use to us because the insistence of our law on oral testimony left little scope for the admission of witness statements and other documents, which form the bulk of traffic under the European Convention. However, this position is no longer tenable. Changes to the law of evidence in England and Wales, first in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 and now as proposed in the Criminal Justice Bill, mean that significant steps are being taken to enable documentary evidence to be admitted in English criminal proceedings, and to make it easier to admit evidence taken overseas. Similar provisions are expected to be enacted for Northern Ireland and, though the possibility of such changes in Scotland must await the outcome of the current review of criminal evidence by the Scottish Law Commission, a number of modifications have already been made to the "oral testimony only" rule.
8. The starting-point of the working group's study was the new Commonwealth Scheme, which was formally adopted by Law Ministers in Harare in July 1986. But the Group also considered the implications of participation in the European Convention and general mutual assistance treaties with particular countries.
Deficiencies in present powers to render assistance
9. The United Kingdom is at present seriously hampered in providing mutual assistance, principally because of the limitations of existing legislative provisions (see Annex C). These powers do not provide the breadth of mutual legal assistance which is regularly provided in Western Europe and elsewhere. The United Kingdom's failure to
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