Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 29th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, speaks with his usual eloquence. One of the problems from our Benches is that he seems to think that it is an acceptable risk to breach the rule of law. It is that fundamental issue that my noble friend Lord German set out in his Motion, and that is why, unusually, this is something that we should vote against at Second Reading.

This weekend, the i newspaper reported:

“Four Rwandans have reportedly been granted refugee status in Britain over ‘well-founded’ fears of persecution … the cases are in addition to the six people who Home Office figures suggest had UK asylum claims approved between April 2022 and September 2023, according to the Observer”.


So how can the Prime Minister say that Kigali is “unequivocally” safe?

I want to raise a couple of issues in the short time that I have available on the details of how this will work. First, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Stewart, referred to access to healthcare, but the British Medical Association raised the important point that:

“The use of offshoring has previously led to asylum seekers being removed to countries where they are unable to access medical care they may need … Medical reviews of 36 people under threat of removal to Rwanda revealed that 26 displayed medical indicators of having been tortured”.


Is it right that people like that should be going elsewhere?

The government website on the agreement with Rwanda talks about age assessment for both accompanied and unaccompanied child asylum seekers. Article 3(4) says that the United Kingdom

“confirms that it shall not seek to relocate unaccompanied individuals who are deemed to be under the age of 18. Any unaccompanied individual who, subsequent to relocation, is deemed by a court or tribunal in the United Kingdom to either be under the age of 18 or to be treated temporarily as being under the age of 18, shall be returned to the United Kingdom”.

How is that going to work if they are assessed in Rwanda? How is the decision made on who are deemed to be under age, given the provisions of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 and the Illegal Migration Act 2023, and the arrangements set out in the Rwanda treaty? Will an unaccompanied child or young person have been entitled to appeal prior to removal to Rwanda—or will, as the latter part of the paragraph implies, they be sent to Rwanda and assessed with all other asylum seekers, and only then returned to the UK? That is against the United Nations rights of the child declaration. Will Rwanda use age assessment, as we debated during the passage of the Nationality and Borders Bill and the Illegal Migration Bill?

I particularly want to ask about those who are accompanied and remain with their families—and it is good that families are kept together. But Rwanda does not have a secondary school system, so does the arrangement that is being made with Rwanda ensure that these children will have access to education, if they are of secondary age?

Open Democracy reported that:

“LGBTQ+ asylum seekers in Rwanda have previously been given immediate verbal rejections by officials responsible for registering applications, who said it ‘is not the place for them, or Rwanda does not deal with such issues’, according to evidence by the UNHCR submitted to the Home Office”.


So is it appropriate for these vulnerable people to be sent to Rwanda?

Finally, the Illegal Migration Act stipulates that, if someone arrives in the UK irregularly, there will be a duty on the Home Secretary to detain and remove them—even those arriving who are known to be victims of modern slavery. In the passage of that Bill in the Commons, Theresa May, former Prime Minister and Home Secretary, said sending people to Rwanda would

“consign more people to slavery”.—[Official Report, Commons, 11/7/23; col. 219.]

The noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, asked what opposition parties would do. We would ensure swift and effective assessment of cases. What we will not do is to send people to a country where we do not yet understand how the treaty will work, because what is said in the treaty is that there are arrangements proposed, but they have not yet been sorted. For vulnerable asylum seekers, that is not good enough. It is certainly not good enough for what any British Government and British Parliament should do.

Above all, for vulnerable people, Rwanda is not a safe place. As the treaty says specifically, there is much still to be sorted out. I believe that this House should not agree to the Bill at Second Reading.