Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Chris Stephens Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Joanna Cherry (Edinburgh South West) (SNP)]

I feel as if I have been sucked back in time to listen to Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech again. I represent a multicultural constituency containing many immigrants, many asylum seekers and many refugees, and I can tell the House that my constituents do not support the Bill. At the weekend, all sorts of people stopped me in the street to tell me that they hoped I would speak against it because they found it repugnant. Perhaps the hon. Member for Don Valley (Nick Fletcher) needs to inform his constituents that the reason they live in the conditions he described, and the reason they have such low wages, is not immigration, but more than 10 years of Tory government.

What I intend to focus on is the law, not as a lefty lawyer but as someone who tries to do what lawyers are bound to do—look dispassionately at the law. Those who listen to the public debate about the Bill, in the media at any rate, could be forgiven for thinking that the debate about its legality was confined to the competing tribes within the Conservative party, but fortunately it is not. There are sources of advice independent of the Government and independent of their querulous Back Benchers, and it is on them that I want to focus.

This morning, the Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights published a briefing based on the independent legal advice that has been given to the Committee. That independent legal advice is for the benefit of all Members of Parliament and peers, which is why it has been published. I have also had occasion to consider the briefing published by the Bingham Centre for the Rule of Law. They are both important, because the Government are trying to position themselves as having stopped short of breaching international law, but those independent briefings make it clear that they have not. The Bill undermines the principles of the rule of law and the separation of powers, which are supposedly central to the British constitution, as well as undermining various of our international obligations.

I commend to hon. Members a reading of the independent legal advice that has been given to the Joint Committee on Human Rights. I will take a few highlights from it. Requiring the courts to conclude that Rwanda is safe, even though the evidence has been assessed by the UK’s highest courts to establish that it is not, is a remarkable thing for a piece of legislation to do. If the Government were so confident that Rwanda has suddenly become safe in the last month, as I said earlier, why pass this Bill at all?

Another point made in the Joint Committee on Human Rights’ legal analysis is that disapplying the Human Rights Act is very significant. If human rights protections are disapplied when they cause problems for a policy goal, they lose the fundamental and universal quality that characterises them, and that is arguably particularly the case when they are disapplied in respect of a particular group—in this case, migrants who have come to the UK without prior permission. In my own aside, I will just remind the House that history shows that when a country withdraws human rights from a particular group, it is on a particularly slippery slope.

The independent legal advice to the Joint Committee also makes it clear that, crucially, no matter what the legislation says, it can affect only domestic law. That was the point of my intervention on the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) earlier. As the Supreme Court explained only a month ago, the United Kingdom is prohibited from allowing refoulement under the refugee convention and the ECHR, as well as under the UN convention against torture and the international covenant on civil and political rights. Passing this Bill will not change the fact that we are signed up to those obligations in international law, and it will not change the fact that we are breaching our international legal obligations, so the Conservative Members—particularly the lawyers—who have convinced themselves that it is okay to go through the Lobby and vote for the Second Reading of this Bill tonight are simply wrong. If they look at the independent legal advice from the JCHR and the Bingham Centre on the Rule of Law, they will see that that is the case.

[Chris Stephens (Glasgow South West) (SNP)]

Is it not a fundamental problem with the Bill that so many people see it as punishing the exploited and not the exploiter? If the Government were serious about this issue, that is exactly what they would focus on.