Immigration Control (Gross Human Rights Abuses) Bill [HL]

Baroness Warsi Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 15th December 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Warsi (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, on bringing forward the Bill to the House. She has many admirers on all sides of this House and I fully endorse the words of my noble friend Lady Bottomley, who elegantly and succinctly reminded us why we all admire her so much. I too support the Bill and, as I speak lower down the order, I fully endorse comments made by noble Lords on all sides of the House—it is not often that I can say that. I hope that that means I will not have to speak for as long as I might.

I congratulate the Government on adopting the amendment to the Criminal Finances Act, which brought in the first part of the Magnitsky Act but, as other noble Lords have said, this does not go far enough. It is right that, as my honourable friend the Security Minister, Ben Wallace, said,

“we need to make the UK a hostile environment for those seeking to move, hide and use the proceeds of crime and corruption. In an increasingly competitive international marketplace, the UK simply cannot afford to be seen as a haven for dirty money”.

We must go further than that: we must not be a haven for dirty deeds and human rights violations.

The law which the Bill would create has widespread support in this House. Polling has shown that it has popular support in the United Kingdom. It has support across the political divide and is in tune with what has happened in the United States, Canada and other European countries, as other noble Lords have already mentioned. More than five years ago, a motion was unanimously passed in the House of Commons calling for visa and economic restrictions on Russian officials involved in the original crimes uncovered by Magnitsky and in the cover-up since his death. A month later, the Foreign Affairs Select Committee issued recommendations to make public the list of banned human rights violators, with reference to the Magnitsky case.

The noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy, also referred to the Home Secretary’s overarching power to refuse or remove those whose presence in the UK would not be conducive to public good. You may therefore ask: what is the need for this law? However, as you have heard from my noble friend Lord Trimble, those bans are rarely published and often, when questions are asked, they are neither confirmed nor denied; there is no naming and shaming and no knowing who is here and who has been allowed in; no light is shed on those who have operated in very dark ways.

Let me quote again Ben Wallace. He said that when dealing with the financial provisions that we now have this measure would,

“send a clear statement that the UK will not stand by and allow those who have committed gross abuses or violations around the world to launder their money here”.—[Official Report, Commons, 21/2/17; cols. 975, 881.]

I argue that we need to send a similarly strong signal in relation to the presence of these individuals in the United Kingdom. We have said, “We don’t want your money here”; we need to say, “We don’t want you here either”.

This Bill, however, must not limit itself to the specific and appalling circumstances that the House has heard about today around the death of Sergei Magnitsky, even if it is motivated by that. The Bill must be universally applied. In the United States, initially a limited Magnitsky Act was passed in 2012 to deal with the specific issues and individuals surrounding that case. However, four years later, that Act was made global. It authorised the President—at a time when we had a US President to whom human rights mattered somewhat—to block or revoke visas and impose property sanctions if individuals or entities are responsible for, or acted as an agent for someone responsible for, extrajudicial killings, torture or other gross violations of internationally recognised human rights. A similarly broad Act could and should be adopted by us.

Every day, we see the most heinous human rights abuses committed around the world by the so-called respectable, official and powerful. Officials, politicians and military personnel in Burma have been a particularly horrific case in recent months. This Bill could apply to those at the highest level who commanded such acts, but also to those on the ground who committed such acts. While we must always in the long term seek to bring the perpetrators to justice, either in their home countries or the fora of international courts, in the short term we must send out the strong signal that it cannot be business as usual. Our belief in and commitment to human rights must be clearly visible when people seek to enter the United Kingdom.

This Bill, extending previous legislation, would enable us to say that if you have been known to have committed or been involved in gross human rights abuses—or possibly even wider than that, as we have heard—then Britain will not be a place where you can do business, buy property or holiday. If your children come to study here, you will not be at their graduation. If you have blood on your hands, you will not be doing your Christmas shopping at Harrods. Earlier today, this House discussed refugees and family reunion. For centuries we have quite rightly been a haven for those who flee from human rights violations and abuse. We must never become a haven for those who commit such abuse.