Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Lord Carlile of Berriew and Lord Cashman

Committee stage
Monday 12th June 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cashman (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly to the amendments in this group. In so doing, I refer your Lordships to my entries in the register of interests, particularly as patron of the AIDS and HIV charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust.

I particularly support the amendments of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, who brilliantly explained the reasoning behind them. As he says in his explanatory statement to Amendment 105, the current wording of Clause 38(5)(c) is too wide and would preclude

“a human rights claim pursuant to Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights”,

which the Government are suddenly clinging on to. It would also preclude a protection claim pursuant to the refugee convention. I am not a lawyer, so I will not dwell too much on those matters; however, I support the argument that what is proposed in this clause is not in conformity with the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg and not in accordance with the jurisprudence of the United Kingdom.

At the heart of this provision is the removal to the so-called safe countries in Schedule 1. As your Lordships will know, I am not alone in my concerns; they were discussed with great concern on the first and third days in Committee and today. Indeed, the Minister, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Bellamy, tried to reassure me and others that the list was really an amalgam and that the countries, where people who might be subject to discrimination because they belong to a particular social group will be going, might perhaps say, “We don’t want them”. That is a wonderful hypothetical answer, but my reply is: what if a person who is HIV positive is sent to a country, such as Uganda, where that person, if they are lesbian, gay or bisexual, would have to say to their medical practitioner that they are lesbian, gay or bisexual? That medical practitioner, if they did not reveal that information to the Government, would face two years’ imprisonment, while the person receiving treatment themselves could be criminalised. That is just one country from a huge range of countries, not only around the world but particularly within the Commonwealth. Some 80% of the countries of the Commonwealth currently criminalise people because of their sexual orientation and gender identity.

Because of the lateness, I will now take my place. But for the reason I have just cited, and many more, I heartily and unreservedly support these amendments, particularly those of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton.

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, I will speak in support of both my noble and learned friends, who sit to my right in the Chamber. I am particularly grateful, as I think the whole Committee is, to my noble and learned friend Lord Etherton for the very clear exposition he gave of the law and of the consequences of these provisions which change the law.

I will put my very short analysis of this into “faults” and “conclusions”. Clause 38 is word soup, full of tautology and contradictions—the sort of thing that makes fortunes for lawyers if they can get in front of judges, like my noble and learned friends in the very senior courts, and make esoteric arguments based on an analysis of the text. The word soup is most certainly not a consommé clarified by the use of egg whites, so that you can see through it to the bottom of the bowl. It is more like a sort of mad minestrone, into which the draftsman has thrown every word vegetable that he or she could find.

Let us look at Clause 38(3), where the “serious harm condition” is in inverted commas. I was taught at school never to use inverted commas, if you could avoid it, because they show a weakness in your argument, unless it is a quotation that someone said. It says:

“The ‘serious harm condition’ is that P would, before the end of the relevant period, face a real, imminent and foreseeable risk”.


Supposing we missed out the words “real, imminent and”, what difference would it make if it simply read,

“before the end of the relevant period, face a … foreseeable risk of serious and irreversible harm”?

If one missed out the words “and irreversible”, would it mean less if it read:

“The ‘serious harm condition’ is that P would, before the end of the relevant period, face a … foreseeable risk of serious … harm if removed from the United Kingdom”?


What are they trying to gain by the word soup—the possibility of making bizarre submissions in front of the senior courts in which my noble and learned friends sat?

After those comments, if you were asked, “What does all this mean?” by a lay man who might be up at 10.10 pm looking at parliamentary TV or parliamentlive.tv and fascinated by every word in this debate, you would say to him, “Just go and have a look at Clause 38(5)(c)”, which refers to

“where the standard of healthcare available to P in the relevant country or territory is lower than is available to P in the United Kingdom”.

They—or at least those who were well informed enough to be sitting up at 10.10 pm, watching parliamentary TV—would immediately say, “This is deliberate discrimination against gay men”. What else is this for?

We should be ashamed of ourselves if, at least when it comes to Report, we allow this kind of provision to remain in the Bill and do not help my noble and learned friends to pass their amendments. But I hope that we do not have to reach that stage, because this word soup should seem as ridiculous to our noble friends the Ministers as it does to some of us.