Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 29th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, when researchers and historians come to assess the work of the 2019-24 Parliament, I suspect they will be completely baffled by the reasoning that led three successive Governments—those of Johnson, Truss and Sunak—to rely so heavily in countering the obnoxious human trafficking of migrants across the channel on a scheme to send those migrants, despite the fact that a majority of them are likely to have legitimate grounds for seeking asylum, off to a small African country which our own Supreme Court has ruled is not a safe destination for them. That is without even considering their case for seeking asylum here.

This scheme, the third legislative iteration of which is before this House today for Second Reading, is deeply flawed on the grounds of practicality and of value for money. It requires the upending of the unwritten conventions which have governed the relationship between the legislature and the judiciary for centuries, by barring our courts, from the Supreme Court downwards, from intervening. It makes a bonfire of a large number of this country’s international legal commitments and puts others at serious risk of following them on to the fire—quite a score for one relatively short Bill.

I do not want to dwell for too long on the arguments about lack of practicality. We now know that the Prime Minister—when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer—set them out to No. 10 pretty cogently. It is argued by the Government that this year’s Illegal Migration Act has already proved to be an effective deterrent and has reduced the 2023 channel crossings by one-third. However, that assertion is completely unproven. A substantial part of that reduction has in fact resulted from the very welcome agreement with Albania, which enables nationals of that country to be returned as economic migrants. It is nothing to do with the Rwanda scheme.

Another unquantifiable but also substantial part of that reduction is due to the equally welcome intensified Anglo-French police and intelligence co-operation. It must be, or else we are paying an awful lot of money for nothing. Moreover, while the Government refuse to say whether there are any limits on the numbers who could be sent to Rwanda under the scheme, they must fall a long way short of those still being brought across the channel. Therefore, the deterrent effect of the Rwanda scheme is moot, to put it very politely.

As to the constitutional propriety, others have spoken about that issue, and I will not extend my remarks on it.

Then there is the bonfire being made of our international obligations by the present Bill and its predecessors. The refugee convention is first amongst them, as the Supreme Court recognised in its recent ruling. Then there is the convention against torture, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and other international legal instruments we took pride in signing and ratifying. That is without taking account of the risk that the Bill would empower the Government to step out on to a slippery slope that could lead to our departure from the European Convention on Human Rights and from the jurisdiction of its court, which, as was so rightly said by the previous speaker, is not a foreign court. I am aware that the Government assert that we are doing none of these things, but they assert that unilaterally, in the face of strong views to the contrary by the bodies set up to interpret and safeguard those commitments. On that, a reading of the testimony of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to the Supreme Court, and more recently on this Bill, is really salutary. To do that is to make a mockery of the Government’s otherwise admirable championing of a rules-based international order.

There is a large amount to criticise in the present Bill, and little, if anything, to commend in it. It is surely a case of the cure being worse than the disease. Cures there are, and they are not simple; all require much closer, more effective co-operation with our European neighbours. They could also be helped if we were prepared to process swiftly and offshore claims for asylum. That is the approach which Italy, Germany and Denmark are said to be contemplating, not the Government’s choice of denying migrants who cross the channel any consideration at all of their asylum claims.