The Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill was presented to the House of Commons on 30 November 2010.
Part four, section 151: Restriction on issue of arrest warrants in private prosecutions

New Subsection (4A): ‘Where a person who is not a public prosecutor lays an information before a justice of the peace in respect of an offense to which this subsection applies, no warrant shall be issued under this section without the consent of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

New Subsection (4C): Subsection (4A) applies to (a) a qualifying offense which is alleged to have been committed outside the United Kingdom, or (b) an ancillary offense relating to a qualifying offense where it is alleged that the qualifying offense was, or would have been, committed outside the United Kingdom.

Consistency-wise, it seeks to balance the commitment to ensuring that suspected war criminals are brought to justice with the requirement that there be sufficient evidence of suspicions to justify limitations on a person’s liberty. As Dapo Akande noted, the status quo is that ‘private persons may apply for an arrest warrant without consent’ whereas ‘prosecutions under these laws require the consent of the Attorney General’. The result may be insufficiently grounded arrest warrants, with a lower threshold (prima facie evidence). The presumption of innocence, cherished when prosecutions are brought against individuals in their home states regarding alleged violations of domestic law, should be particularly manifested in UJ cases where the jurisdictional basis is at least somewhat doubtful. Moreover, conceptually, the State, via its agent (the prosecutor) is responsible for determining when a case is solid enough to merit a criminal trial, and so it is the state that should also determine when a person’s liberty should not infringed.

Regarding selectivity, claims are quite frequently raised regarding the ICC prosecutor’ choice of cases- see here http://allafrica.com/stories/201006070002.html (recent accusations by African parliamentarians) and a sample discussion here (http://dovjacobs.blogspot.com/2010/03/q-on-icc-and-africa-is-criticism-on.html). Risk of selectivity is more alarming when individuals may decide to pursue an internationally (renowned?) in view of potential extra-legal gains (political and others). To illustrate, one need only follow the controversy surrounding the anticipated Pope’s UK visit- see here (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/apr/13/pope-prosecution-dawkins). A government sets general policy guidelines (one would hope) and is bound by reasonableness standards when making its judgments, whereas a private person is not. It is therefore less likely that frivolous warrants will be requested, let alone issued.

Additionally, the UK government seems to exercise good judgment. Rather than combat impunity, the 2003 Ariel Sharon Belgium incident, the 2005 ‘Heathrow airport escape’ by Maj. Gen. (res. ) Doron Almog (following an arrest warrant issued under the until-then dormant 1957 Geneva Convention act), and the 2010 attempt to arrest Tzipi Livni have embarrassed the respective governments, leading the former to change the Belgian law to be rather in line with the proposed UK legislation, and forced the UK government to toe a fine line in its recent public statements.

Notably, by following the government’s proposition, the UK will not be flouting its international obligations. For instance, under Article 146 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, a contracting party is obliged to ‘search for persons alleged to have committed or to have ordered to be committed…grave breaches, and…bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts.’ Nothing in this stipulation requires or even suggests that the state should delegate part of its responsibility to private persons.