Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Baroness Northover Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 29th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, I am honoured, as ever, to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, who has made a very passionate case. Many speakers today have focused on the legality and morality, or otherwise, of the Rwanda scheme, and the astonishing claim that this Parliament has the overriding ability to decide whether Rwanda is safe. I will focus on another astonishing aspect: the simple unsuitability of this scheme.

Last July, I was in Rwanda for a major conference on women’s rights. While I was there, I visited, with the UNFPA, the Mahama refugee camp in eastern Rwanda. Overseen by the UNHCR, this houses 60,000 refugees, largely from Burundi, but also from other countries in the region which have been suffering conflict. There are strong cultural similarities between the refugees and their hosts. Full provision is made for housing, schools, and training. There are villages led by local leaders, markets for stallholders, and a bus service to enable travel to work. We visited impressive health clinics, which covered a range of care, including minor operations, vaccinations, malnutrition care and mental health services. What is more, the local population can access these facilities, so they can see a benefit from having refugees among them.

Let us contrast this with what the UK plans to do for those seeking assistance at our borders. None of these elements is in place. It is no surprise that the Government do not want parliamentarians to visit the site, as we found. It is beyond amateur. It is in Kigali, in an unused housing development, surrounded by other housing developments for the local population. Its capacity is extremely limited, for merely a few hundred, and these will supposedly be men from diverse countries, backgrounds, languages, religions and experience—people who will have been uprooted from their countries, communities and families. How is that supposed to work? Of course, the site is not big enough to provide specialised healthcare, training, or language or cultural support—any of the facilities that such asylum seekers potentially need. It is right in the middle of the local population, with the strong possibility of mutual fear—a potential recipe for conflict and exploitation.

My noble friend Lady Hamwee refrained from speaking today because of the number of speakers, but she has mentioned to me points made by various organisations. Removing asylum seekers to a country where they do not want to be, with little prospect of work, not understanding the language, with inadequate support, increases the likelihood that they will seek to leave, or be open to offers to help them do so. Israel had an agreement with Rwanda, but no one knows what happened to that cohort. They are not there now; it is very likely that they were smuggled onwards or trafficked and exploited. The Minister says that he seeks to reduce trafficking, yet this policy opens up a new market for traffickers. The Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law has advised that the Bill will put the UK in breach of the convention on trafficking in human beings.

As the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham and the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury have rightly said, Rwanda has made great strides since the terrible years of its genocide. Nevertheless, the UK Supreme Court has deemed it still an unsafe country—and we have heard a number of reasons why that is the case, not least from the noble Lord, Lord McDonald. We have recently granted asylum to Rwandan refugees, as my noble friend Lady Brinton pointed out. Of course, it appears to be part of the Government’s narrative for the right-wing press that Rwanda is a desperate place in which to end up—acting as an apparent disincentive to those who may seek asylum in the UK. It is ironic that they then deem the country safe.

Conflict and climate change will doubtless increase migration. Working on global strategies to tackle this, as the most reverend Primate Archbishop of Canterbury pointed out, is clearly vital. Right now in central America, they are facing a massive traffic in migration. Costa Rica, with a population of 5 million, is housing a further 1 million from Nicaragua. One of the first things must be to invest in conflict prevention and development. The assistance that has been channelled to Rwanda since its terrible conflict has clearly improved the lives of many of its citizens, so there is less migration from Rwanda itself, despite the clear limits to freedom there. Yet we cut our aid budget—how short-sighted.

Others have argued with overwhelming force that the Bill offends against both morality and legality. From what I have seen of the UK’s plan on the ground in Rwanda, compared with more effective ways of supporting refugees in that very country, it seems to me that we are pouring huge amounts of money into what is almost an amateur scheme. That hardly reflects well on the United Kingdom.