Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Baroness Chakrabarti and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Report stage
Wednesday 6th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak very briefly in support of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope, and the amendments in this group. I do so for three reasons.

First, whatever one’s views about international law, parties to any dispute must have some access to interim relief—whether neighbourhood disputes or business disputes, and particularly in relation to human rights concerns. The Government are resisting interim relief in our domestic courts, but they really cannot do that in relation to the European Court of Human Rights as well, or there will be no interim relief for mistakes that can lead to very dire consequences—as has happened in the past, even in immigration cases in this country.

The second reason I support the amendments in the group is this. When the Government originally raised concerns about Rule 39 last year, it was because of natural justice concerns about the procedure of the courts not always allowing Governments to be heard, or not allowing them to be heard after interim relief had been granted. Those procedural concerns have now been addressed, not least thanks to the efforts of Foreign Office Ministers, including the noble Lord, Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, for which he is to be commended.

Finally, I think back to yesterday’s debate, which did your Lordships’ House such credit. I remind noble Lords that there are currently Rule 39 interim measures in place to prevent the Russian Federation executing Ukrainian prisoners of war. It will do our arguments and moral authority no good at all if we start saying that we can pick and choose which Rule 39 measures we accept.

I say to the noble Lord, Lord Lilley—in relation to his question to the noble and learned Lord—that he might like to look at today’s Politico, where Dunja Mijatović, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, has criticised not just the present Bill but the French state for the very case that he referred to. The French were wrong to do what they did and we must do better.

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

My Lords, I oppose Amendments 36, 37, and 38 in respect of Rule 39 interim measures. I am afraid that I will not observe or respect the admonition that we should brief necessarily. We are discussing the substantial and significant issue of parliamentary sovereignty, and the right of the British people to have their views respected and not blocked by an unelected House, especially when the elected House, the other place, has been able to make a decision in significant numbers.

In deference to the sensitivities of the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, I will, for the avoidance of doubt, be referring to “an international” rather than “a foreign” court. I am sure he will be pleased about that. These are fundamentally blocking or wrecking amendments, designed to make the Bill inoperable. They are designed to thwart the will of the people, expressed through an electoral mandate and the will of the other place, to reduce immigration and to fulfil the primary duty of government, which is to protect its borders and its people and, more importantly—I look to the Lords spiritual in this respect—the moral imperative to save lives in the channel and destroy the business model of evil people traffickers.

More specifically, these amendments subvert and traduce the long-held principle that our laws are made in Parliament and implemented by the courts—simply, the concept of parliamentary sovereignty—in favour of a nebulous, opaque concept of “the rule of law” and the ECHR as a living document. The former is essentially uncodified and lacks precise consensual meaning, but it is used to advance judicial activism by unelected, unaccountable jurists in an international court, undermining faith and trust in the court system, parliamentary democracy and government in this country and destroying the delicate equilibrium between the Executive, the legislature and the judiciary. There is but one rule of law, and that is made in Parliament by elected representatives. That confers legitimacy on our proceedings. These amendments will assist in furthering the trend towards the politicisation of the judiciary.

Even the concept of the separation of powers, much lauded in this House, is itself alien to the constitutional settlement of the UK, and is certainly an evolving issue. It is unclear and prey to subjective interpretation, as we established earlier this week on Report when we discussed the deeming presumption of a safe list for asylum seekers, including Greece, in the case of Nasseri v Secretary of State in 2009. This was ultimately found by the Appeal Court and the House of Lords, under Section III of the ECHR and the Human Rights Act in respect of inhuman treatment, not to have violated those pieces of legislation. That was the Blair Government, who created an unrebuttable presumption that a list of countries was safe, so there is a precedent already set many years ago.

I wish to ponder briefly the idea of the rule of law, Rule 39 interim measures and the implications for parliamentary sovereignty and the myth of the ECHR, which is eulogised with rapture by so many noble Lords in the context of our own Parliament and judicial system. Advancing the rule of law as superior to parliamentary sovereignty—“the rule of lawyers”, as my noble friend Lord Lilley said in his excellent opinion editorial in the Daily Telegraph two days ago—is what we are looking at. It is about the subjective fiat of another court, over which we have no control. It is a modern phenomenon, as opposed to parliamentary sovereignty, and an example of judicial mission creep. That said, even Lord Bingham stated, after the case of Jackson v Attorney-General on the Hunting Act 2004:

“The bedrock of the British constitution is … the supremacy of the Crown in Parliament”.


He echoed the thoughts of such eminent jurists as Lord Denning and AV Dicey, to whom I referred in Committee.

As we know, and as my noble friend Lord Lilley alluded to earlier, the French have taken an altogether more robust view of the authority and sanctity of their own domestic legislation vis-à-vis the perverse and sometimes dangerous and damaging rulings of the ECHR. In November 2023, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin removed an Uzbek national, MA, who was allegedly a radicalised Islamist extremist, despite a Rule 39 interim measure against this being done, the first time that the French Government have openly defied such an interim measure. Indeed, they also defied the Conseil d’État, the equivalent of the Supreme Court.

The French elite is more likely to question and challenge the état de droit, the French equivalent of the rule of law. In an article in Le Figaro—

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between Baroness Chakrabarti and Lord Jackson of Peterborough

Committee stage
Monday 19th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I think that is a moot point, in so far as—

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

Oh!

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I am always delighted to amuse the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti.

Articles 26 and 27 of the ECHR expressly limit the competence of a single judge vis-à-vis the Chamber of the Court or the Grand Chamber. I agree that in a case such as Hirst v UK (No. 2) [2005] on prisoner votes, we—as a Government, Ministers and the Executive—specifically set our face against a decision of the Grand Chamber. That was liable for criticism.

But the fundamental question here is: is the use of Rule 39 interim measures at the heart of what you would call international law? As I will set out very briefly, that is not necessarily the case, because the ECHR makes express provision for the constitution of the court and its jurisdiction. A single anonymous judge at the court breaches the limit of what the ECHR establishes as the competence of that single judge as the legal authority. Indeed, interim measures are not, in effect, de facto rulings of the Strasbourg court at all, and the Minister is therefore not in breach of “international law”. I make reference again to Articles 26 and 27 of the convention.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. I am very interested in his points about international law and so on. As a matter of basic common sense and logic, does he understand why there is value in the interim measures of any court, domestic or international? Does he understand why it is sometimes necessary to have some kind of mechanism for preventing a case becoming totally academic and preventing the outcome being decided before the case has been properly and finally heard, whether in a domestic or an international court? If he agrees that there is sometimes value in that, and if he has concerns about the way the Strasbourg procedures work, does he not think that the first thing to do would be to try to negotiate reforms to those procedures, rather than just taking domestic powers to ignore them?

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I say, gently, to the noble Baroness that this issue with unrestricted, unprecedented levels of geopolitical change and immigration is sui generis. Therefore, one has to see it through that prism. Yes, broadly and in principle, it is better to negotiate than to withdraw from a convention or another legal regime. But you cannot always use the case that, because Putin has been beastly, we self-evidently and axiomatically have to deal with his breach of international law. After all, invading a sovereign country such as Ukraine is a bit different from some of the other cases the noble Baroness used. It does not mean that you cannot be critical of the overall application of the legal regime we are discussing.

In fairness, my noble friend Lord Hailsham’s amendment is very fair-minded, enabling the Government potentially to present the evidence that, hitherto, they were not able to do in the 2022 case. Indeed, the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Coker, is eminently sensible—actually, it is rather otiose, because one would always assume that the Home Secretary would seek the advice of the Attorney-General in proceeding in these small number of cases.

Two of the amendments the noble Baroness put forward are clearly wrecking amendments. The amendment that would disapply Section 55 of the Illegal Migration Act would specifically remove the express parliamentary sanction and authorisation of non-compliance with the interim measure, which, in itself, is a draconian move. Amendments 58 and 60 go to the heart of what we assume to be international law, in terms of what is justiciable in domestic law.

Let us be honest and put our cards on the table. This is about tying up the Bill in endless judicial reviews to stop any people being removed and to stop us tackling one of the biggest, endemic, troubling issues in politics. It is about bringing this back under the purview of domestic legislation in order to establish a roadblock via judicial review.

My final point is about the Human Rights Act 1998. It does not give legal effect in domestic legislation to the Strasbourg court’s Rule 39 practice, which is grounded in Article 34 of the European Convention on Human Rights and is not one of the Commission rights set out in Schedule 1 to the 1998 Act. For those reasons, therefore, there is a very big question mark over the use of Rule 39 interim measures. Are they really international law as we would define it? Noble Lords would be wise to consider that when they come to vote for these amendments.