Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Baroness Kennedy of Shaws and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

Report stage
Wednesday 5th July 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, we have just had mention made of the young woman from Tehran. I have been in touch with that young woman; in fact, there are more than one of them. Some of your Lordships may have seen the BBC programme last week, which showed the amount of footage that was recorded on cell phones of what happened when the young woman Mahsa Amini was taken into custody because she had her scarf on in an inappropriate way. She ended up in a coma, and then dead. Two young women journalists had got into the hospital and photographed her in that coma, then photographed her family being told that she was dead. Photographs were seen in that programme of her beaten body, her face obviously pulverised by blows. In the days immediately afterwards those two journalists knew that, once they had published their film footage, they would be at risk of arrest—and there was no way that we could get them out. Contact was made, but there was no way.

A few months ago I spoke to the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad, who is always so sympathetic to these positions. Turkey is one of the obvious places that people can flee to, but it is not a safe place for Iranian women; we have seen returns of people to Iran. The question was: if they got to Turkey, could they go into the British embassy, ask for a visa and be given sanctuary and help to get out? The noble Lord had to come back to me and say no, that would not be an acceptable way of dealing with this.

So what is the mechanism for journalists like that, who are in imminent danger? Those two women journalists are now serving six years apiece. They were put on trial, were not allowed to have lawyers and are now serving sentences in jail. That is why I tabled an amendment to the Bill suggesting that there should be emergency visas so that people in imminent danger can do something to get out.

That usually means journalists. I have personal experience of sitting in this country with Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist who had written about Putin and his conduct. She went back to Russia, and three weeks later I saw her body on the stairwell of the building she lived in, with blood pouring down the stairs because she had been shot. These are real events in the lives of people who are being courageous in calling out the abuses of Governments, yet there is no way that we can help them to escape.

It is not only journalists. The lawyer acting for Navalny, the opposition leader who was making a stand against Putin, was immediately arrested. There ought to be ways in which we can provide emergency visas for people to get out. In 2019 the Government announced:

“A new process for emergency resettlement will also be developed, allowing the UK to respond quickly to instances when there is a heightened need for protection”,


and that is what we were calling for. Four years later, that still has not happened.

In 2021, in the months immediately after the military evacuation of Afghanistan, I was directly involved in trying to get judges, particularly women judges, out of that country. We managed to evacuate 103 women judges and their families, but only a small number of them were taken in by Britain. At that stage I delivered a petition to No. 10, signed by tens of parliamentarians, lawyers and human rights experts, calling on Her Majesty’s Government to introduce as a matter of urgency emergency visas for the remaining women judges, women television presenters and women Members of Parliament who had not managed to get out. I did not hear a dicky bird. I did not even get a reply to the petition; I am sure that Mr Johnson took it with him into retirement.

We now have the embarrassment that Canada has created emergency human rights defender visas, as has Ireland. The Czech Republic recently did so too, at the behest of the great project that this country was at the heart of creating, the Media Freedom Coalition. We advised that there should be emergency visas for journalists and were persuading the world to create them. The Czech Republic did so, and it now has a huge number of the journalists who had to flee Russia. Do we have many of them?

I too will support the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud. I will not ask for a vote on mine because we are in a bit of a hurry but, if we accept the very sensible amendment to create emergency visas and new routes for people, I call on the Government to include the ones that will be necessary where people’s lives are in imminent danger, as we have seen in a number of conflicts recently.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, the House will know that I support the direction of travel of the Bill. I have therefore listened with particular care to the heartfelt, heart-rending speeches from the noble Lords, Lord Alton and Lord Kerr, and the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, but the House and indeed the country are entitled to know, broadly, the scale of the commitment that we would be asked to accept if all these amendments were passed.

Therefore, I will detain the House for a minute or two, particularly in relation to the background to Amendments 162 and 164. I accept that the phrase “safe and legal routes” has a seductive ring to it, because it makes it sound as though we can square an extraordinarily difficult circle. But in the end it comes down to numbers, and in Amendment 164 I see no mention of a cap or limit on the numbers—I stand ready to be corrected.

I heard my noble friend Lady Stroud refer to the Minister’s reference to caps for local authorities but, if she argues that this is one way for us to get around and break the business model of the boat smugglers, I ask her: what happens when we fill up to the cap that my noble friend the Minister will have devised? Will the people smugglers not reappear immediately? In relation to my noble friend Lady Stroud’s proposed subsection (3), on the procedures to be used and who will undertake them, there is a great deal of open-ended difficulty, not least around the sort of issues we discussed a few minutes ago about the definition of “children”—this will be about the definition of a “relevant person”.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Baroness Kennedy of Shaws and Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Thursday 3rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

I accept that point, but I do not accept the point that large centres cannot work if they are properly designed and managed. That is not necessarily a reason for rejecting the possibility of there being larger reception centres, albeit that they may be built around buildings that have existed before.

When my noble friend the Minister replies, I am looking for her to say that we have no more Napier barracks hidden away somewhere, that we are moving in the direction of travel given by the right reverend Prelate and that, with that provision, we should continue to be prepared to provide centres that may be larger because they answer some of the requirements and traumas that those unfortunate people are experiencing.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I support these amendments and pay tribute to those whose names are attached to them, because they all raise important issues. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Horam, that there was something of a Freudian slip when he suggested that we were here dealing with illegal immigrants. Perhaps the tabloid newspapers are having too much of an effect on his view of what is happening.