Illegal Migration Bill

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 13th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. In order to have co-operation on return agreements, on alternative arrangements for processing or on any of those things, there must be proper standards in place, and other countries must respect those standards if they are to make agreements with us. Therefore, pulling away from the European convention on human rights makes those agreements more difficult, despite the fact that having those international agreements in place is one of the most important steps to dealing with the challenges we face.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

rose—

[Paul Holmes (Eastleigh) (Con)]

rose—

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[Yvette Cooper]

I will give way to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and then to the hon. Member for Eastleigh (Paul Holmes).

[Caroline Lucas]

Does the right hon. Lady share my deep concern about the placeholder clause 49, which seeks to legislate to ignore ECHR interim orders lodged against this Government’s inhumane, morally abhorrent plans, to get around the fact that what the Government are doing is not compatible with our convention obligations? Does she agree that that will undermine our global standing and make it harder to make returns agreements or anything else that she describes?

[Yvette Cooper]

I think it adds to the chaos within this piece of legislation that the Government have not worked out what they want to do. As a consequence, they are undermining our reputation as the kind of country that stands up for the rule of law and leads the way in expecting other countries to follow the law and to do their bit as well.

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[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

This immoral, deeply cruel and divisive Bill breaks international law, rides roughshod over human rights and shames us all. I would argue that it shames especially the Ministers who are deliberately and dangerously stirring up hatred with their vile and dehumanising language. I am pleased to associate myself with the reasoned amendment in the name of the hon. Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy).

Let us have clarity on some of the facts. The UK offers safety to far fewer refugees per capita than the average European country, including France and Germany, and to far fewer than the countries neighbouring those from which 70% of the refugees from the global south flee. Behind the numbers and statistics are real people with lives, hopes, families and dreams. In the words of the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire,

“no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land”

and unless

“home is the mouth of a shark”

or

“the barrel of the gun”.

The bottom line is that, far too often, there are no other routes available to those fleeing violence and persecution, many of whom have family here with whom they want to be reunited. Locking them up is beyond cruel.

The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has warned that the Bill

“would amount to an asylum ban”,

but Ministers simply do not care. They are even coming up with new ways to circumvent international law. The Bill explicitly gives them the authority to ignore future interim ECHR rulings, so even if a case were lodged in Strasbourg, they could still press on with detaining and criminalising asylum seekers while the courts are deciding—a process that can take up to three years.

The Government do not care whether the policy works—that is not what it is about. It is about dividing and ruling; it is about stoking cultural wars; it is about picking a fight with the European Court of Human Rights for cynical electoral gain. The Government certainly do not care about the human beings caught in the crossfire. If the Government seriously wanted to protect the lives at risk from small boat crossings, they would back more generous family reunification rights and support safe, functioning routes.

I have a constituent whose wife and daughters are stranded in Turkey, having fled Afghanistan in August 2021. They do not have the documents to apply for a family visa, and they are not eligible for the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme. They have played by the rules for the past 18 months and are desperate enough to consider crossing the channel to be reunited. Government Ministers have not lifted one single finger to help. Even those who are eligible for the ACRS cannot make it work. Not one Afghan has come to the UK via pathway 3 of the ACRS since it opened in June last year.

On the front page of the Bill, the Home Secretary invites Parliament to rip up international law. The only act of a Parliament that has any kind of moral integrity would be to rip up her illegal and immoral Bill, which has no place in statute.

Illegal Migration Bill

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Committee stage
Tuesday 28th March 2023 Commons Chamber

Are the Government really saying that an LGBT person whose case will not be assessed, because they will not talk to them and find out why they are at risk, will be returned to Nigeria to be whipped or stoned to death? That is what the Bill sets out. They are not considering the risk to individuals at all. They have made a list of safe countries that are clearly not safe for everybody, and have no understanding of what that will mean in practice for the people they are seeking to remove.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

The hon. Lady is making an incredibly powerful case against this, frankly, rotten and disgusting Bill. Does she agree that without her amendment 186, clause 2 effectively shuts down pretty much the whole UK asylum system? It captures nearly all asylum applicants—not just those who come by boat but the nearly half of all people who do not arrive that way. Without her amendment, the asylum system in this country will no longer work in any shape or form.

[Alison Thewliss]

I absolutely agree. We accept that the Government have made an absolute hash of the asylum system. The asylum backlog is enormous and they should pay attention to it, but tackling the problem by denying anybody else asylum ever does not seem the legitimate way to deal with it.

Clauses 11 and 12 expand the power of detention. As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on immigration detention, I find that an incredibly worrying development. It includes people who cannot be removed to their country of origin. The UK Government have previously said that their policy was to decrease the immigration detention estate, but that will now be expanded dramatically. The harm done to people in detention facilities is immeasurable. It exacerbates existing trauma, tears families apart and has crushing impacts on mental and physical health. After the Home Secretary has removed the right to apply for bail, thousands more will be trapped in the system indefinitely.

The UK’s detention system is already an international outlier, with people held indefinitely, out of line with provisions in the criminal law system. I received an email earlier from Elspeth Macdonald, who works for Medical Justice, on worrying and serious reports of a death at Colnbrook immigration removal centre. I would be grateful if the Minister stopped playing with his phone and confirmed whether the reports of the death there are true, because it is incredibly worrying. What steps are the Government taking to ensure that there will be an investigation, if the death did happen. There have been deaths in other immigration centres, and we do not want the Government repeating those dangerous errors. I would like to know what appropriate counselling and bereavement support have been made available to people in that detention centre, because that is a frightening experience for them.

It would be useful to know why the Home Office has stopped including the number of deaths in immigration detention from the official immigration statistics. They were published every year from 2017 to 2021, but in the latest statistics for 2022, deaths were not included. Immigration detention is bad for people. It is bad for their mental health. If there is to be further immigration detention—[Interruption.] The Minister shakes his head, but the evidence is incredibly clear that immigration detention is bad for people.

The Bill also expands detention criteria to include children, which rolls back on hard-won rights that the Glasgow girls and others fought for. Immigration detention is no place for anybody, and certainly not for children. Some of the detainees that the Minister wishes to hold will be pregnant. The British Medical Association has said that under the Illegal Migration Bill, the 72-hour time limit on the detention of pregnant women, introduced by the Government in 2016, will be denied to women who arrive by irregular means. Instead, pregnant women will be locked up indefinitely, while the Government attempt to remove them from the UK. They will not be allowed to apply for immigration bail for the first 28 days that they are detained or for juridical review of the lawfulness of their detention. Many pregnant women are likely to languish in detention for some time, since there are few returns agreements in place by which they could be removed from the UK.

I highlight a particular case study from Women for Refugee Women of a woman called Priya, a trafficking survivor detained in Yarl’s Wood when she was 20 weeks pregnant and held there for almost two months before being released. Priya said:

“I only had one hospital appointment while I was there, for my 20-week scan, and even then I was escorted by officers who took me 40 minutes late for my appointment. I felt frustrated that I wasn’t able to speak to the midwife after my scan because there was no time. The officers just took me straight back to Yarl’s Wood instead. It was not easy. I often felt weak and in pain; I’m anaemic and my blood pressure is very low. On one occasion I passed out in Yarl’s Wood, but they just took me back to my room and left.”

Pregnant women are being locked up in detention centres. What kind of message does that send to the rest of the world? It is inhumane.

Clause 12 amends the Immigration Act 1971, and specifies that determining what is a reasonable period to detain people is for the Secretary of State rather than the courts. Those changes would apply to existing detention powers as well as the new powers provided in clause 11. The amendment removes the considerable latitude given to the Home Secretary to decide what is reasonably necessary to enable examination or removal. Clause 13 amends the immigration bail provisions in schedule 10 to the Immigration Act and restricts the jurisdiction of the courts to review the lawfulness of a decision to detain or to refuse bail.

Clauses 15 to 20 deal with the provision of asylum accommodation for children by the Home Office rather than local authorities, which is entirely unacceptable. The Children’s Commissioner for Scotland has condemned that move in the strongest terms, saying:

“The Home Office’s history of neglect renders it an unfit parent for vulnerable children.”

The Children’s Commissioner for England says:

“The Bill as it stands leaves profound areas of uncertainty–for example, as to what form the accommodation provided to children by the Home Office will take–making proper scrutiny deeply challenging.”

The Home Office has already lost children from the accommodation it has used, so we cannot trust it to look after things at present. Why would we give it more powers in this area? On Second Reading I spoke about treating people as we would like to be treated. We would not treat our own children in that way, so why do the Home Secretary, the Minister and this Government think that we should?

Illegal Migration Bill

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

We believe that they do, because at the heart of this scheme is the principle that if an individual comes to the UK illegally on a small boat, they will be removed back home if it is safe to do that—if they are going to a safe home country such as Albania. In determining that the country is safe, for example, as in the case of Albania, we would have sought specific assurances from it, if required. Alternatively, they will be removed to a safe third country, such as Rwanda, where, again we would have sought sufficient assurances that an individual would be well-treated there. As the hon. Gentleman can see in the courts at the moment, those assurances will be tested. So it is not the intention of the UK Government to expose any genuine victim of persecution to difficulties by removing them either back home and, in the process, enabling their refoulement, or to a country in which they would be unsafe. We want to establish a significant deterrent to stop people coming here in the first place, bearing in mind that the overwhelming majority of the individuals we are talking about who would be caught by the Bill were already in a place of safety. They were in France, which is clearly a safe country that has a fully functioning asylum system.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

Let me take the right hon. Gentleman back to the criticism he was making of the other place, because if the elected House is about to break international law, it is entirely fitting that the other place should try to prevent that from happening. The Minister has stood at the Dispatch Box telling us that this Bill is about deterrence, whereas the Home Office’s own impact assessment has said:

“The Bill is a novel and untested scheme, and it is therefore uncertain what level of deterrence impact it will have.”

As a raft of children’s charities have pointed out, once routine child detention was ended in 2011 there was no proportional increase in children claiming asylum. So will he come clean and accept that this Bill absolutely will have the effect, even if it does not have the intention, of meaning that people trying to escape persecution will not be able to come here, because there are not sufficient safe and legal routes?

[Robert Jenrick]

I am not sure exactly what the hon. Lady’s question was. If it was about access to safe and legal routes, let me be clear, as I have in numerous debates on this topic, that since 2015 the UK has welcomed more than 500,000 individuals here—it is nearer to 550,000 now—for humanitarian purposes. That is a very large number. The last statistics I saw showed that we were behind only the United States, Canada and Sweden on our global United Nations-managed safe and legal routes, and we were one of the world’s biggest countries for resettlement schemes. That is a very proud record. The greatest inhibitor today to the UK doing more on safe and legal routes is the number of people coming across the channel illegally on small boats, taking up capacity in our asylum and immigration system. She knows that only too well, because we have discussed on a number of occasions one of the most concerning symptoms of this issue, which is unaccompanied children who are having to stay in a Home Office-procured hotel near to her constituency because local authorities do not have capacity to flow those individuals into safe and loving foster care as quickly as we would wish. That issue is exactly emblematic of the problem that we are trying to fix. If we can stop the small boats, we can do more, as a country, and be an even greater force for good in the world.

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[Sir Edward Leigh]

The Minister can relax; I am not going to bang on about RAF Scampton—not least because I have put in for the Adjournment debate on Thursday when I can deal with it in more detail. I just ask the House to accept that my constituents are, more than any others in the country, victims of this farce—this debacle—of trying to house 2,000 people in one place. That is not good for the people and it will overwhelm our social services.

There is now an argument to be had about the future of the House of Lords. There is no point in our having these endless debates about whether it should be elected or not. It should be a proper revising Chamber. When it is given a Bill such as this, its attitude should be, “How can we improve it? How can we make it work better? How can we remove these legal glitches, which will have unintended consequences?” It seems to me that so much of the debate in the House of Lords and so many of the amendments have just been designed to drive a coach and horses through the Bill and to give human rights lawyers even greater chances to develop ever more legal arguments to stop anybody from being deported.

I have some sympathy with what the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) said. What is a bit of a mystery to me is that we went through this whole process last year. We had the ping-pong on the Nationality and Borders Bill. We got it through Parliament and were told that it would solve the problem—but we still have the same problem. I prophesise that, actually, this Bill will become law. The Labour party does not want to set a precedent for the unelected House of Lords to block legislation, so it will give in and the House of Lords will deliver the Bill. It will become an Act of Parliament, and I have a horrible feeling that, this time next year, we will be in exactly the same position. Can we rely on the Supreme Court to agree that people should be deported to Rwanda?

What are we going to do? Is it crueller to detain people as soon as they arrive or to do nothing and have a tragedy in the channel? Is it cruel to continue letting people smugglers get away with what they want? Of course, I have enormous sympathy with what my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) says about children, but the trouble is that so many of these people who claim to be children are not children—they have to be assessed. One of the problems we face at Scampton is that there are so many of these people, 20% of the population coming into the camp, which means there will have to be an army of social workers to determine whether they are children.

I have enormous sympathy for persecuted LGBT people, but the truth is that the moment we create an exception saying that we cannot deport a person to an African country with a dodgy record on LGBT, everyone will claim to be LGBT—of course they will. I would do the same. If I were coming from Iraq, I would say I am a Christian. If I were coming from Syria, I would say I am gay. This is the problem we face. Every time we try to do anything, human rights lawyers drive a coach and horses through all our efforts.

So what are we going to do? I have said for two or three years now that the only solution—I suspect the Government will be dragged into this within a year—is to have a derogation, if necessary a temporary derogation during a national crisis, from the refugee convention, which prevents us from detaining people who claim to be asylum seekers. We will also have to have a derogation from the European convention on human rights.

I am a member of the Council of Europe, and I value the work of the Council of Europe, but the European Court of Human Rights is not a supreme court like our Supreme Court. It is not a supreme court like the American Supreme Court. It is a fundamentally political body, appointed on political grounds.

Until we have freedom of manoeuvre to have a real deterrent that tells the world, “If you land illegally on our shores, you will be detained and, ultimately, you will either have to go back where you came from or be deported,” we will never stop this problem. It is all right for the Labour party to talk about safe and legal routes, and about what it will try to do, but we all know that that did not work for the Dublin convention and it will not work if Labour takes power. President Macron will not suddenly change his mind. He will not take anyone back. We will be in this exact position in 15 months’ time if there is a Labour Government, and I predict that, if there is a Labour Government, they will simply leave this Act on the statute book pretty well unamended.

My constituency is a victim of all this, so what is the House going to do? This is utterly debilitating. We cannot go on like this. Please, can we have a plan?

[Caroline Lucas]

It is sadly not a pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh). Talking about leaving or having derogations from human rights law is exactly what is wrong with the Government’s approach to this issue and what is wrong with this vile Bill.

With overwhelming support from across the political spectrum, and backed by Conservative peers and by religious leaders, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, the other place is absolutely right to have inflicted a string of defeats on this vile, illegal Bill.

Lords amendment 1B, in the name of Baroness Chakrabarti, should be easy for any decent Government to accept, because it simply asks for compliance with the rule of law, which is the bedrock of our democracy. But the Government are attacking that foundation, forced to admit on the face of this immoral Bill that they are unable to say it is compatible with the 1950 European convention on human rights. By moving a motion to disagree to Lords amendment 1B, the Government are seeking to deny UK judges the right to interpret this law and to check it against compliance with the UK’s obligations under no fewer than five international conventions that we should be defending, not undermining.

The Minister in the other place tried to argue that a previous version of this amendment was trying to incorporate international law into domestic law and that, in doing so, it was an unacceptable change to our legal framework. I do not think that that is what the previous version did, but, for the avoidance of doubt, in this version Lords amendment 1B is explicit in calling for the interpretation of international law to ensure compliance with our international obligations. Indeed, Ministers will be aware of the contribution from Lord Hope, who served as deputy president of the Supreme Court and last week said that this amendment is a

“pure interpretation provision…entirely consistent with the way the courts approach these various conventions….it is entirely orthodox and consistent with principle.”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 12 July 2023; Vol. 831, c. 1817.]

Adhering to the refugee convention, the European convention on human rights, and other international laws we have signed up to should be non-negotiable. What a terrible state of affairs it is that the Government want to vote down an amendment seeking compliance with the rule of law.

The Government’s argument is that stripping vulnerable people of asylum and other human rights will stop other vulnerable people falling into the hands of the people traffickers. That is both morally bankrupt and utterly bogus. It is morally bankrupt because human rights are not earned or contingent on a person’s conduct or character, or on whether upholding those rights might affect someone else’s actions. Human rights are attached to a person by virtue of their humanity. Vulnerable people, including children, are being punished because of presumed future actions of adults. Furthermore, by disagreeing with Lords amendment 1B, Ministers face the charge of hypocrisy, as they disrespect international law and undermine migrants’ rights at a time of unprecedented international turmoil. Just last week, the Prime Minister was at a NATO summit absolutely saying that we need to uphold international law against the grotesque breaches by Putin in Ukraine. Yes, we do need to do that, but let us have a little moral consistency.

As well as being immoral, the Government’s argument about a deterrent effect is bogus and unevidenced. The Home Office’s own impact assessment, published just last month, is peppered with caveats about how undeliverable this policy is. It includes an admission that:

“The delivery plan is still being developed.”

The lack of evidence on deterrence in that document is glaring. It says that the Bill is “novel and untested”, so we do not know what impact it will have on deterrence. As I said earlier, a raft of children’s charities have pointed out that once routine child detention was ended in 2011, there was no proportional increase in children claiming asylum. Beyond that, there is a strong evidence to show that it is the precisely the hostility towards refuges exemplified by this Bill and the Government’s rejection of Lords amendments to it that fuels the grim and terrible trade in small boats that they claim they are against.

So any Member who votes to block the Lords amendments should admit that in doing so, they degrade the rule of law, dehumanise vulnerable refugees, attack our modern slavery laws, put LGBT refugees at grave risk, and that their approach will lead to the unconscionable mass detention and treatment of children, with no stated time limit to that detention—it is sickening. I will be voting to uphold the Lords amendments, because this Bill shames and degrades our country, our democracy and this House.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I want to speak mainly about Lords amendment 1B, and to follow up on the remarks made by the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) and the right hon. Member for Gainsborough (Sir Edward Leigh). I heard him make exactly the same argument in the Council of Europe, when, to the consternation of most of its members, he argued that Britain had to criticise and walk away from the European court of human rights because one case was found against Britain. Many more cases have been found against almost every other country that signed up to the European convention on human rights and, therefore, the Court.

I support Lords amendment 1B because it gives some protection under the 1950 European convention, the 1951 UN convention and the conventions on statelessness, on the rights of the child and on action against trafficking. The Lords amendment will mean that any decision has to be taken in accordance with those conventions. If the Government are opposing those, what message are they giving, other than that they have no respect for international law and for the conventions we helped to write and sign up for, and that they want to walk away from them? Walking away from them will mean that we have no regard for the rights of people seeking asylum if the European Court of Human Rights finds us to be wanting in that respect. Therefore, should any other country want to walk away from the European convention on human rights, for example, Turkey, Poland or Hungary, all of which have issues with their legislation in respect of the convention, we will be in no position to criticise anybody ever again. The idea that this country is facing a crisis so severe and so serious that we have to walk away from conventions that were hard fought for and have served the human rights of people across Europe very well is simply ridiculous. On a global scale, the numbers of people involved are enormous, because of economic stress around the world, wars, environmental degradation and destruction, and human rights abuse. That is why people seek asylum.