Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

The problem for the right hon. Member is that he has a scheme that is likely now to cost £400 million and that is only likely to cover less than 1%, and perhaps less than 0.1%, of the people arriving in this country. That is why the permanent secretary has said that there is no evidence of a deterrent. We need the practical measures to take action to go after the criminal gangs and to work with our neighbours. He says that the Government are doing that already, so how come there has been a drop of 30% in the number of people convicted for people smuggling? If they are really going after the criminal gangs when we know that people smuggling across the channel has rocketed, how come convictions for people smuggling have plummeted by 30%? That is the evidence that the Government are failing to do the basics to tackle those practical things.

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

The right hon. Lady is making a powerful case that seeking to legislate by assertion that Rwanda is safe is as dangerous as it is ridiculous. Does she agree that those who claim that this is about parliamentary sovereignty, and that that is why this sinister attack is justified, are wrong, because Parliament can be meaningfully sovereign only within a functioning legal and constitutional system, which this Bill totally undermines? Without the courts being able to interpret law, the legal system does not work, and it undermines this place, too.

[Yvette Cooper]

We have constitutional roles for Parliament and the courts. It is right for Parliament to respond to court judgments, to adapt and to change policy, but this Bill instead puts at risk the compliance with international law that we need to be able to make further agreements.

I do not think that, in the end, all of this is about Rwanda; it is about the deep divides in the Conservative party. It is about their chaos. It is about the Prime Minister’s inability to show leadership. It is about the fact that they just want to tear lumps out of each other. They are creating chaos while letting the country down.

The former Immigration Minister, the right hon. Member for Newark, has said that the Government are now aiming for just

“one or two symbolic flights off before the next election with a handful of illegal migrants on them”.

That is not the same as stopping the boats, strengthening border security or fixing the asylum chaos.

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

This year is the 75th anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights. What an irony, and what a shameful indictment of Ministers, that our Government are marking it by putting in front of Parliament a Bill to wave aside our human rights obligations and the judgment of the highest domestic court in the land.

This insulting and dangerous legislation attacks both human rights and our democratic structures. In doing so, it both demeans and disrespects the role that the UK has played in helping to shape the international rules-based order, including its contribution to the drafting and early ratification of the European convention on human rights in the aftermath of the horrors of world war two. It is stated on this shameful Bill’s very cover that the Government cannot say that it complies with the UK’s obligations under the ECHR—a terrible admission of this Government’s willingness to violate the principle that human rights are universal and belong to all of us by virtue of our humanity.

As others have noted, the Bill overturns an authoritative, unanimous Supreme Court judgment based on extensive evidence and made just three weeks ago. Our highest domestic court ruled that by sending refugees to Rwanda, the UK could breach its obligations under the ECHR and other international laws such as the refugee convention, the UN convention against torture and the UN international covenant on civil and political rights, as well as domestic law.

In seeking to oust the jurisdiction of our domestic courts by forbidding them from making assessments of fact and disapplying the Human Rights Act, the Bill is constitutionally exceptional and provocative. It explicitly disapplies multiple sections of that landmark Act, including basic minimum standards that protect us all, leaving barely any room for judicial scrutiny. Courts would be barred from considering whether removing an individual to Rwanda could result in removal to a country where they would face torture or inhuman and degrading treatment. What kind of Government would want the courts to ignore that and undermine the separation of powers that is fundamental to UK democracy?

This ugly Bill also attacks interim measures: a vital human rights tool under international law issued on an exceptional basis in extreme circumstances where individuals face a real risk of serious and irreversible harm. It both enables UK Ministers to decide unilaterally whether the UK should comply with interim measures and prohibits UK courts from having regard to them when considering any case relating to a removal decision to Rwanda.

To try to justify this cynical and sinister attack on the highest court in the UK, the Prime Minister has started to say that “Parliament is sovereign.” Obviously, Parliament can pass whatever laws it wants, but we have courts so that everyone, including this Government, acts with respect for the laws that Parliament has passed.

As others have said, this Bill simply will not work. Its so-called deterrent is not a deterrent to someone fleeing torture or persecution, who has already put their life at risk by taking to one of the busiest shipping lanes in dangerous, inflatable boats. The Bill has nothing to do with that, in any case; it is a performative piece of cruelty by a dying Administration and a grotesque waste of money that is neither practical nor strategic.

Most important of all, the outsourcing of our human rights obligations to a third country is downright immoral. To immorality we can add absurdity. Seeking to legislate by assertion that Rwanda is safe is as ridiculous as it is dangerous. The Government cannot sign a quick treaty one week and legislate the next to make a country safe, when the highest court in the land has said just the opposite. The facts on the ground are what matter. It feels bizarre to have to say it, but apparently necessary: legislation to say that Parliament believes something to be true does not make it so. Fixing the facts on which the law is to be applied is the kind of thinking that dangerous conspiracies are based on.

As Tom Hickman KC said in a paper for Institute for Government:

“If the Government considers that the treaty has eliminated the real risk of refoulement then it should seek to persuade the courts of that, not parliament.”

It should not need saying that when the UK Government sign a treaty, they should stick to it. They now have the embarrassment of being schooled by the Rwandan Government, who, despite their poor human rights record, are sending out warning shots that even they will pull out of this shoddy deal if the UK Government breach international law to implement it.

I will vote against Second Reading tonight, because there is no tweak or amendment that can improve something that is rotten to its core. The Bill is a doomed and draconian attempt to reassert the Prime Minister’s fragile claim to a non-existent authority, but it has serious consequences and sets an extremely dangerous precedent. These are deeply dangerous times in this country, and they are made more dangerous by this Government. We have already seen the suppression of the right to strike and to protest, and other democratic principles and standards seriously eroded. Now we have this flagrant attack on human rights, on our courts and on the separation of powers in this country. I call upon this Government to abandon their cruel, immoral and unworkable Rwanda plan, and to re-establish the UK’s good standing as a member of the ECHR and international community.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Committee of the whole House
Tuesday 16th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I will not give way again to the hon. Gentleman. Let me move forward and speak more directly to our amendments, because that is the purpose of today.

The amendments tabled in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for Stone are in four groups, two of which will be discussed today and two tomorrow. They seek to address the evident flaws of the Bill, and they represent the last opportunity for us to get this policy right. I shall speak directly to mine, and my hon. Friend can speak to the one that he leads on. Mine speak to individual claims. This is a point I have made time and again.

All my experience at the Home Office teaches me that every single illegal migrant who comes to this country will try every possible way to avoid being removed. We know that; that is what they do today. It is human nature that people would do that. We have to legislate for human nature, not against it. Every legal representative and lefty lawyer will try everything they can to support those claims. We see it every time, and experience teaches us that.

The Bill improves the situation; it makes it tighter, but in respect of only the general safety of Rwanda, not an individual’s circumstance.

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

Will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Robert Jenrick]

I will give way to the hon. Lady in a moment. As night follows day, every migrant will say, “Rwanda may be generally safe”—I believe that it is—“but it is not safe for me.” That is one of the central intellectual incoherences, as the Government’s own lawyers have said, at the heart of the Bill. It envisages that Rwanda is generally safe but, for a range of unspecified reasons, foresees that it will not be safe for others. Of course, as we have seen in the past, one person will mount a successful challenge, and that will create a precedent. Every legal representative and non-governmental organisation like Care4Calais will then school everyone to make exactly the same challenge and, time and again, we will lose those cases in the courts. The Bill, in that respect, is legally flawed, but it is also operationally flawed because of that.

Let me explain to those who are, understandably, not as well versed as those of us who have been Ministers in this field: we have only 2,000 detained spaces in our immigration removal centres in this country. On a single day in August, 1,200 arrived illegally on our shores, so in a weekend, all the detained capacity in the whole United Kingdom would be consumed. When hon. Members are considering whether the Bill works, they should see it through that lens.

We have to get people out of the country within days, not months, and the operational plan behind the Bill foresees that it will take months for people to be removed from the country. What will happen is our detained capacity will be filled, and people will be bailed to hotels. They will then abscond and never be seen again. Within a single week in August, this scheme will have failed. That matters for the country and, of course, for the Government. It matters for trust in politics and Westminster, because we will have told people that it was going to work, knowing that it would not work. It also matters for all those other European countries that want the scheme to succeed in protecting our borders.

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[Robert Jenrick]

I will not give way at the moment; let me make some more progress on explaining the amendments, if I may.

The way that flights will work when the scheme commences is not under the Illegal Migration Act 2023 at all. The first several months of flights will involve a group of individuals whom my right hon. Friend the Member for Witham and her officials at the time selected when the Rwanda policy was first devised. Those individuals have been in the United Kingdom for years. We have lost contact with many of them and none of them can be subject to the protections in that Act.

Even if hon. Members believe that the serious and irreversible harm test within that Act is a very strict one—I will come to that in a moment—that will not apply to the flights that will go off in the months ahead. It might not apply to any flights that go off before the next general election. If we want those flights to be full of illegal migrants and for there to be a deterrent effect, hon. Members need to support the amendments I have set out, which create that strict approach.

[Caroline Lucas]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

[Pete Wishart (Perth and North Perthshire) (SNP)]

Will the right hon. Member give way?

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[Robert Jenrick]

I have heard that argument advanced before, and of course I am proud of what we have achieved with the Albania scheme, but that is to judge two quite different propositions. The Albania scheme takes somebody who is in the United Kingdom and asks them to return to their home country, which is a European, highly developed country. That is a very different proposition from enforcing somebody’s removal from the United Kingdom to a third country to which they do not wish to go. Also, as the hon. Gentleman may know, very few small boat arrivals have been removed to Albania. Almost all those individuals who have gone to Albania have been time-served foreign national offenders in our prisons, individuals who have voluntarily chosen to return to Albania and those who have been in the United Kingdom for a long time.

The success of the scheme rests on taking people off small boats, detaining them for very short periods of time and then removing them swiftly to Rwanda. For the reasons I have set out, I think that is extremely unlikely to succeed at any scale in the way the Bill is currently structured.

[Caroline Lucas]

I just point out to the right hon. Gentleman that people arrive in small boats because legal routes have been blocked. When it comes to his amendment in particular, clause 4 of this disgusting Bill already provides a very limited route for individuals to challenge their removal to Rwanda based on their individual circumstances, yet my understanding is that he is seeking to go even further to override individual legal protections—even decisions that contain errors would not be open to challenge under his amendment 22, as I understand it. How on earth is that fair, just or justifiable?

[Robert Jenrick]

On the hon. Lady’s first point, we have had this argument many times before, and she is completely wrong. This country is one of the world’s most generous countries in supporting those in need around the world. Since 2015 we have issued more than half a million visas on humanitarian grounds, more than at any time in our history. On her point about my amendment, it is not correct to say that we would not enable people to challenge on their individual circumstances; they could, but those challenges could not be suspensive. Individuals would arrive in the UK and within days—which is critical to the success of the scheme—they would be removed to Rwanda. There they could bring forward claims as they might wish, but it would not block the flights, and that is critical. Without that, the scheme will simply not succeed.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Caroline Lucas Excerpts

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 18th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[Joanna Cherry]

My answer to the hon. Lady is that, as I said at the outset of my speech, in assessing whether Rwanda is a safe country for asylum seekers, particularly LGBT asylum seekers, we need to consider what we heard from people when we were there, as well as the objective evidence. She will recall that I questioned several people on this subject. No one was able to give me an example of any gay or transgender person ever availing themselves of the law to protect their rights. There is a difference between that and the position in the United Kingdom, where anyone who is same-sex attracted or transgender is protected by the Equality Act 2010 and by the European convention on human rights; if they lose their job or are refused housing, for example, they can go to court.

We need to look at what we heard in Rwanda. We heard very positive things from two Government-approved LGBT rights non-governmental organisations, but there is also evidence—again, particularly in the Home Office note—suggesting that the situation is rather different. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Hartlepool (Jill Mortimer) may scoff, but that note was prepared by her Government.

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

The hon. and learned Lady is making a case about the importance of evidence. Does she agree that there is evidence right in front of us in the fact that the UK Government accepted asylum claims from a number of people from Rwanda at the back end of last year? If it really is the paradise that we have just been hearing about, and if we can guarantee that into the future, it is quite surprising that people from that country are claiming asylum in the UK.

[Joanna Cherry]

rose—

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[Sir Michael Ellis]

Thank you very much, Mr Deputy Speaker.

That arrangement is entirely reasonable—and, as I said at the beginning, the amendments are relevant to this whole concept. If one comes to this country illegally, one should not have the ability to repeatedly prevent one’s removal, at vast expense to the taxpayer. However, because of Labour votes that were no doubt whipped by the Leader of the Opposition, the House of Lords defeated the Government 10 times on amendments, seeking to neuter the Bill and ensure that no one was ever sent to Rwanda. They did not vote down the Bill, and did not vote for these 10 amendments, because they want it to work; they did so because they do not want it to work.

What none of those peers on the Opposition Benches did was provide an actual alternative to the Rwanda partnership. None of them could say how they would deter people from getting into overloaded dinghies on the beaches of northern France, or prevent the deaths that will surely follow. In voting against the Bill, the Lords were therefore constitutionally, legally and morally wrong, and I urge the House to overturn their amendments.

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

I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in the debate.

This Bill is an affront to the principle that human rights are universal and belong to all of us by virtue of our humanity. The amendments from the other place are an attempt to stop the Government violating that principle and, I would argue, undermining not just Parliament but the courts and the rule of law in the process. Despite unacceptable and unparliamentary pressure from the Prime Minister, who urged peers to rush their scrutiny and simply go along with his dangerous, authoritarian Bill, they have rightly inflicted 10 defeats on the Government. They have done so by large majorities, signalling profound opposition to the Prime Minister’s deeply illiberal, deeply inhumane Rwanda legislation. The Home Secretary’s motions to disagree are consistent with this Government’s track record of cruelty towards people seeking asylum. We saw another example of that very recently in the Home Office’s jaw-dropping admission that it does not routinely inform family members when asylum seekers die in Home Office care.

Lords amendment 1, tabled by Lord Coaker, simply adds maintaining full compliance with domestic and international law to the purpose of the Bill. One might have imagined that that would not be up for debate, and it is a measure of how low this Government have sunk that they are opposing an amendment which simply says that their Bill should comply with the rule of law, something I had thought Conservative Members were meant to believe in. In particular, the amendment is needed to stop the disapplication of the landmark Human Rights Act, something I believe we should be proudly defending. It is also needed to protect interim measures—a vital human rights tool under international law, issued on an exceptional basis in extreme circumstances when individuals face a real risk of serious and irreversible harm.

The Bill states that

“the Parliament of the United Kingdom is sovereign”

and that

“the validity of an Act is unaffected by international law”,

and we have heard a great deal more of that from Conservative Members this afternoon. I think that Ministers should stop misusing the concept of parliamentary sovereignty, which is not embodied by riding roughshod over the courts. Let me draw their attention to a point made very clearly by Professor Mark Elliot, chair of the faculty of law at the University of Cambridge. As he explains,

“Parliament can be meaningfully sovereign only within a functional legal and constitutional system—and such a system can only exist if its other component elements are permitted to play their proper part.”

I suggest that that is exactly the principle that the Government are seeking to trample over with the Bill, which brings me to the way in which the Government are attacking parliamentary sovereignty by undermining the jurisdiction of the courts.

Lords amendment 6, in the name of Baroness Chakrabarti, is vital. It would allow our courts to play their proper part: to hear evidence and scrutinise the legality of Government decisions, allowing our system to protect individuals from risk to life or inhuman or degrading treatment. Likewise, Lords amendments 4 and 5 at least allow for the presumption in the Bill that Rwanda is safe to be rebutted. Without these amendments, the Bill directs courts to ignore the facts that are in front of them. The amendments are a modest reprieve for facts and evidence in what remains a thoroughly vile Bill.

It is extraordinary that the Government can be so fearful of evidence. Why would they not want to look at the evidence before them? Let me refer them to the recently published World Report 2024, which deals with human rights in Rwanda and makes pretty grim reading. It states:

“Commentators, journalists, opposition activists, and others speaking out on current affairs and criticizing public policies in Rwanda continued to face abusive prosecutions, enforced disappearances, and have at times died under unexplained circumstances.”

I also urge Members to consider how constitutionally and legally astonishing the Bill is. The Joint Committee on Human Rights has been explicit about how extraordinary it is, stating that

“Requiring the courts to conclude that Rwanda is safe, even though the evidence has been assessed by the UK’s highest court to establish that it is not, is a remarkable thing for a piece of legislation to do.”

That brings me to Lords amendments 2 and 3, which stand in the name of Lord Hope of Craighead, the former Deputy President of the Supreme Court. There has been much discussion about them, but they require monitoring of the safety of Rwanda, while accepting the assertion that the treaty makes Rwanda safe. Let us suppose for a moment that we suspend our disbelief and our notice of all the evidence now that suggests Rwanda is not safe. Even if it were safe, how on earth can we be legislating that it will be into the future, for any degree of indefinite time? Much in this Bill is an affront to common sense, but that seems to be in a league of its own. Facts change and when they do, we need to change our view of those facts—to do anything less is moving towards a moment of madness.

I want to be clear that although I will vote to uphold these Lords amendments, because they are an improvement on this dreadful Bill, I maintain my view that seeking to legislate by assertion that Rwanda is safe is as dangerous as it is ridiculous. The Government cannot sign a quick treaty one week and legislate the next to make a country safe, when the highest court in the land has said just the opposite. The facts on the ground are what matter and these amendments say that the facts should be monitored. What kind of Government would oppose that?

To conclude, I will vote to uphold Lords amendments 1 to 10 because they make this Bill slightly less constitutionally transgressive and inhumane. The Home Secretary’s motions to disagree with the Lords are laughable, coming just days after he has been exploiting the desperation of vulnerable people by offering them £3,000 to go to Rwanda voluntarily. Amended or not, the Bill remains a grotesque waste of money that is neither practical nor strategic; it is no less than a piece of performative cruelty from a dying Administration.

[John McDonnell]

Leaving aside the decision of the Court, on Lords amendment 9 we are in danger of reversing the work that this House has put in to ensure the protection of victims of modern slavery and trafficking; removing the amendment makes them vulnerable again, particularly to re-trafficking. I cannot for the life of me understand why there is not support from the Government for Lords amendment 9, which merely asserts the decision maker’s opportunity to assess the impact on the physical and mental health of the individual and their potential to be re-trafficked.

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention and he is absolutely right in what he says. It is ironic that by refusing these amendments, the Government are, in a sense, going back on pledges and commitments they have made on trying to uphold issues relating to human trafficking; this Bill is hugely damaging on so many levels. Others have spoken about amendments to provide at least some possible protection for unaccompanied children or for victims of modern slavery and those at the highest risk of harm if removed to Rwanda. We must consider what voting against those amendments means, just as we must do in respect of Lords amendment 10, which relates to the people in Afghanistan who have done so much for us, putting their own lives at risk for our Government and our country. On the idea that we would simply send them off to Rwanda, the right hon. Gentleman has already made a powerful intervention about what that would do for people who are already so vulnerable.

I sum up with a message that I hope that peers in the other place will consider. It is, of course, right and fundamental that the House of Lords should act in accordance with its subordinate position in relation to this elected House of Commons—that is the usual way in which we proceed. For the other place to override the Commons, the bar must be an extraordinary and profound attack on the very fabric and operation of our constitutional democracy. I regret to conclude that this Bill is just that and so the other place would be well within its rights—indeed, this is its responsibility—to uphold the amendments it has already put in place. This Bill is demeaning and degrades both Houses by ignoring the rule of laws that we have passed.

Furthermore, the Bill seeks to legislate facts and prevent courts from considering them. Fixing the facts on which the law is to be applied is the kind of thinking that dangerous conspiracies are based on. That way lies authoritarianism. I urge those in the other place to put a stop to this Bill, and I urge everyone in this House to vote in favour of the amendments tonight.