Nationality and Borders Bill (Eighth sitting)

Debate between Bambos Charalambous and Mike Wood

Committee stage
Thursday 21st October 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Bambos Charalambous]

My hon. Friend makes an excellent point, and he is absolutely right. People linked to my constituents are Chevening scholars who were told to go to Kabul airport. They got no assistance and are still stuck in Afghanistan, with no way to get out. It is deeply concerning, and they feel let down.

It clearly makes no sense to seek to penalise and, in some cases, even criminalise those who have been forced to take dangerous journeys. In our view, it is an insidious way of dehumanising a group of people who deserve our support—it is victim blaming of the most crass and immoral type. Penalising people for how they have arrived in the UK has particular implications for already vulnerable groups of refugees, such as women and those from LGBT communities. Women are often compelled to take irregular routes to reach safety, as we can see only too clearly in Afghanistan. There are simply no safe and legal routes that exist. Even the Government’s much-vaunted resettlement scheme relies on women escaping from a regime in which they are forbidden to walk around freely in the streets.

In many cases, even if the Government created new safe routes from dangerous parts of the world, they would simply not be available to all those in need of protection. Many women would not be able to safely reach an embassy or cross a border to access a resettlement programme, if those routes did indeed exist. Some women would be able to disclose their need for protection only once they reached a country that they considered safe. Under the proposed changes, however, women who arrive irregularly, including through a safe third country, would be penalised. Furthermore, a woman could be prosecuted, criminalised and imprisoned for one to four years. All these obstacles apply to those from LGBT communities as well. We simply ask the Government: how on earth does this draconian and inhumane treatment of vulnerable groups sit alongside British values of fairness?

Another huge flaw in this part of clause 10 is that many of the journeys facilitated by people smugglers are undoubtedly dangerous. Much attention has been directed by the Home Secretary and certain sectors of the press to the minority of people who enter the UK’s asylum system via boat crossings of the channel. However, that is far from the only dangerous journey that is made to enter the UK; the Home Secretary emphasised that when referring to the tragedy of the 39 Vietnamese people who lost their lives in a container found by Essex police in 2019.

Again, as the Home Secretary identified in her speech, the dangers are not limited to the journeys but are also a feature of the violent and exploitative treatment by people smugglers, traffickers and other abusers. Moreover, many of the people who make dangerous journeys to reach the UK from the continent will already have made dangerous journeys by land and sea, including across the Mediterranean.

The fallacy of the Government’s position in penalising people for making irregular routes to the UK is the same as the fallacy inherent in the stated objective of breaking the business model of people smugglers. Unless the Government can provide safe routes—they plainly have not done so in the case of Afghanistan and elsewhere—penalising people for making unsafe journeys is simply cruel. By not providing safe routes, the Government are also fuelling the business model of people smugglers and then penalising the victims they have a responsibility for creating. Do they not understand or are they simply willing to turn a blind eye? In America in the 1920s, prohibition drove the sale of alcohol underground, and a similar thing will happen here: more people smuggling will take place rather than less. The Government are fuelling the people smuggling business model.

It appears that Ministers and those advising them do not appreciate the compulsion to make these journeys, which is strange because they clearly acknowledge that the journeys are very dangerous and sometimes fatal. They are often highly traumatic, physically and mentally, and generally involve at some point extremely violent and cruelly exploitative people.

To give one example, it has long been documented that there is a practice among the women and girls seeking to cross the Mediterranean from Libya of taking contraceptive medication prior to the journey. That is because those women and girls anticipate that they will be raped. Do Ministers have any idea of the desperation involved in making the decision to take such medication? It is clear that although the women and girls fully understand the danger involved in the journeys, they are still compelled to make them, because the alternative of not doing so is even worse.

If people truly had a reason to believe that they were or would be safe where they are, they would not make the journeys. Simply making the journey more dangerous or the asylum system more unwelcoming will not change that. A salutary lesson ought to be taken from the example in 2014 when pressure from the EU, then including the UK, led to Italy’s decision to abandon its organised search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean. The immediate impact over several months before the Government relented was a huge increase in the number of people dead. The need for the journeys had not changed, so the journeys continued. The dangers of the journeys were greatly increased, so hundreds more people lost their lives. Discriminating against refugees obliged to arrive spontaneously will not prevent desperate people from making dangerous journeys. There is strong evidence that a policy focused on closing borders forces migrants and refugees to take more dangerous journeys and leaves them more vulnerable to traffickers.

That brings me to section 2(a) of the clause, which states that group 1 refugees must have

“come to the United Kingdom directly from a country or territory where their life or freedom was threatened”.

In other words, the Government are setting an expectation that to be a refugee who is supposedly deserving of the support usually afforded, the UK must be the first safe country in which they have sought asylum. I cannot state strongly enough how requiring refugees to claim asylum in the first safe country they reach would undermine the global, humanitarian and co-operative principles on which the refugee system is founded. The UK played a key role in developing those principles 70 years ago when it helped draft the refugee convention, and, together with the other members of the United Nations General Assembly, it recently reaffirmed them in the global compact on refugees.

The proposed clause designed around the maxim that asylum seekers should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach and can be penalised if they do not, including by being designated as group 2 refugees, will impact not only refugees but fellow host states and the ability to seek global, co-operative solutions to global challenges.

The expectation that refugees should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach is also unworkable in practice. The Government are aware that there are 34.4 million refugees and asylum seekers worldwide, and the vast majority—73%—are already hosted in countries neighbouring their countries of origin. Some 86% are hosted in developing countries. Low-income countries already host 86% of the world’s refugees compared with the UK, which hosts just 0.5%. To insist that refugees claim asylum in the first safe country they reach would impose an even more disproportionate responsibility on the first safe countries both in Europe and further afield, and threaten the capacity and willingness of those countries to provide protection and long-term solutions. In turn, that would overwhelm the countries’ hosting capacity and encourage onward movement.

It is also worth noting that even within Europe most of the countries that refugees pass through on their way to the UK already host significantly more refugees and asylum seekers per population than the UK does. According to the Home Office’s own statistics, the UK is 17th in terms of the numbers it takes, measured per head of population.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

Does the hon. Gentleman recognise that very few other countries resettle as many refugees as the United Kingdom or take as many through safe channels from United Nations camps in some of the most troubled parts of the world?

--- Later in debate ---

[Bambos Charalambous]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. The burden will fall on all local authorities looking after asylum seekers and their families; they will have no choice but to provide that service. The Government have stayed silent on what provisions they will make for local authorities. I am not sure how far they have even consulted local authorities as to whether they accept what has been proposed.

Clause 10(6) would give the Secretary of State the same power to discriminate against family members of group 2 refugees. At present, the Secretary of State’s powers in that regard are constrained by section 2 of the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993, which states:

“Nothing in the immigration rules (within the meaning of the 1971 Act) shall lay down any practice which would be contrary to the Convention”,

which would appear to preclude the adoption of some of the immigration rules set out in the explanatory notes.

It is worth restating that nothing in the refugee convention defines a refugee or their entitlements under the convention according to their route of travel, choice of country of asylum or the timing of their asylum claim. The Bill is based on the premise that

“people should claim asylum in the first safe country they arrive in”.

That principle is not found in the refugee convention, and there is no history of it in the convention.

[Mike Wood]

The shadow Minister says that there is no history of distinguishing between refugees depending on their route into the country, but that was not the approach taken by the previous Labour Government with the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants, etc.) Act 2004. Baroness Scotland said:

“When a person leaves their country through fear, we consider that, as a general principle, such a person should seek protection in the first safe country where they have the chance to do so. It has been said that nowhere in international law is such a requirement imposed. There may not be such a law, but that does not dilute the argument that a person who is in genuine fear should seek shelter at the earliest opportunity.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 5 April 2004; Vol. 659, c. 1683.]

She was right, wasn’t she?

[Bambos Charalambous]

I do not know the context in which Baroness Scotland said that, but I disagree with her. I very much believe that that would have been breaching international law, as I have stated throughout my speech.