Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Baroness Butler-Sloss and Lord Faulks

Committee stage
Monday 19th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Butler-Sloss (CB)]

My Lords, I was in a queue waiting to pay my bill at dinner and therefore arrived a few minutes late. I am very grateful for the Committee allowing me to speak.

I listened with particular interest to two of the most distinguished lawyers in this House: the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hoffmann, with whom I sat on the Court of Appeal regularly, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton. There is undoubtedly a potential dispute. Without going into what it should be, Clause 5(2) and (3) exclude the English court. The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, complained about the international court; ought we not to be complaining that the English court is excluded?

If there is to be a dispute with the Court of Human Rights, we might bear in mind that we are a member of the Council of Europe. If we blatantly refuse to follow the ECHR at Strasbourg, we might be turfed out, like Russia. Would we want to be the second country after Russia to be excluded from the Council of Europe? Some might not care, but others might think it would not look very good.

What I am complaining about is that Clause 5(2) and (3) will stop our domestic court making a decision. That seems a very good reason to support some, if not all, of the amendments.

[Lord Faulks (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, these amendments all concern the response to interim orders of the European Court of Human Rights—not a foreign court, I entirely accept, but a court of which we are a member. At Second Reading, I absolutely accepted that courts, particularly domestic courts, will need to have powers to make interim orders—to stop a child being taken from the jurisdiction, or to stop someone disposing of assets, knocking down a building or any number of different matters that ought to be ruled on immediately, rather than waiting for the worst to happen.

However, the granting of such orders, particularly if they are obtained ex parte—that is, in the absence of the other side—is always subject to stringent safeguards, and none seemed to be honoured when the court in Strasbourg determined that the Government could not remove an asylum seeker to Rwanda. We still do not know who the judge was; there is no record of his or her reasons. That is why I asked the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, whether she could enlighten us as to the reasons why the order was made. She told us that they would be made only in extremis, when an individual was likely to suffer death or something similar, but there is no explanation of the reasons or any basis on which they came to that conclusion. We do not know what the reasons were.