Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Edward Leigh and Caroline Lucas

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 17th July 2023 Commons Chamber

[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.

United Kingdom Internal Market Bill

Debate between Edward Leigh and Caroline Lucas

Report stage & 3rd reading & 3rd reading: House of Commons & Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 29th September 2020 Commons Chamber

[Sir Edward Leigh]

I rise to speak to new clause 8 in my name. I shall attempt, within your time constraint, Madam Deputy Speaker, to get these complex legal and international law arguments on the record.

The problem is not the possibility of the UK breaking international law, which we do not want to do, obviously; the problem is the UK’s being prepared in case the EU fails in its willingness to interpret the protocol on Northern Ireland in a proper way. We have a legal tool at our disposal that would help clarify the situation in accord with international law: a unilateral interpretative declaration. My new clause 8 describes in some detail how that could be done. It would help our negotiating position in securing an EU trade agreement and, just as importantly, it would help get the Bill through the House of Lords.

Many in the other place will be concerned about the possibility that the UK Government may be opening the door to breaking international law. We pride ourselves on the rule of law and we should maintain our commitment to it. The real problem is whether the EU is willing to implement the protocol in a reasonable and effective manner. We do not need to break international law; we need to prevent the EU from breaking international law by violating its treaty commitments.

The EU has suggested that it would break its commitments in the protocol. It has said that it would consider breaking its commitments to allowing food from England, Wales or Scotland to be sold in Northern Ireland if the UK did not make concessions on the free trade agreement. That is on the record in Michel Barnier’s statement on 10 September. In the light of that, the Government understandably introduced this Bill, so that we can act when the EU threatens the economic integrity of the United Kingdom.

We are committed to implementing the protocol, which we signed up to, but we are only committed to what we actually agreed to—no more and no less. This is the nub of the problem. We are not bound by new interpretations of the protocol that the EU might seek to impose on us. We are not required under international law to accept all the proposals that the EU tables in the negotiations. We cannot accept any bargaining linkage being made between implementing what has been agreed under the protocol in good faith, and what has still to be agreed about our future relationship.

There is a compromise available. We can use international law to ensure that the EU meets the commitments it made in the protocol. We can assert our position, as I have argued, in a unilateral interpretative declaration, if—and only if—the EU behaves unreasonably.

The initial version of the Northern Ireland protocol agreed to in November 2018 could have bound us indefinitely to maintaining full alignment with the EU’s single market regulations and membership of the customs union. In an Adjournment debate in February 2019, I advocated the use of a conditional unilateral interpretative declaration to assert the temporary nature of the backstop. That word “temporary” was then in the protocol.

My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Torridge and West Devon (Mr Cox), who was then the Attorney General, took this up to seek a time limit or a withdraw mechanism from the backstop. That was the basis of documents tabled on 11 March 2019 for the second meaningful vote. Unfortunately, the unilateral declaration issued then was not made strong enough to guarantee an exit from the backstop according to many people in this House. The Government, I believe, should have asserted a stronger interpretation.

Nevertheless, in December last year, we succeeded in getting rid of the backstop. The question is whether the agreed Northern Ireland protocol will be implemented in good faith. The protocol is a good compromise. Rather than abandoning international law, we must use the full provisions of international law to ensure that the protocol is implemented as we agreed.

The general principles of international law applicable to the withdrawal agreement and the protocol are spelled out in the 1986 Vienna convention on the law of treaties. In addition, in 2011, the International Law Commission of the UN codified a guide of practice for handling disagreements about the interpretation of treaties. That allows an individual Government to issue a declaration on their interpretation of the meaning of specific aspects of a treaty. The UK can do that unilaterally, without any agreement from the EU.

To leave the realm of politics and enter the realm of international law, any unilateral interpretative declaration must be sent to the depositary of the treaty. I proposed in an amendment in Committee that the Government should use this declaration to assert their position if the EU were to fail to implement aspects of the protocol. My new clause 8 now spells out in some detail how the declaration could be used. Subsection (1) specifies that the Government should invoke this procedure if the EU fails to carry out the requirements of the protocol. Subsection (2) specifies that the Government should ensure that their interpretation of the protocol is justified by, and in accord with, the provisions of the Vienna convention.

It is important to note that the Vienna convention covers the need to act in “good faith” and the need to avoid results that are “manifestly absurd or unreasonable”. Subsection (3) therefore requires the Government to obtain parliamentary approval before they make a legal challenge, and subsection (4) requires the Government to report back to Parliament on whether the EU has approved the interpretation. If the dispute were to continue, there would be a choice: we could seek negotiations to achieve a compromise in the Joint Committee, or we could invoke the withdrawal agreement’s arbitration procedures. If the dispute could not be resolved and arbitration were required, we would have acted in good faith—that is the point—in international law. We would have established our case and started arbitration on our own terms.

The Government are right to challenge the EU. We can uphold international law. We can challenge the EU with proper legal methods. We do not need to accept its interpretation of the protocol. When we face unreasonable demands, we have a chance to state our interpretation of what we agreed when we signed the protocol. We can challenge the EU with a unilateral interpretative declaration and, hence, defend our position in full accord with international law. I ask the Government to consider positively this compromise, on which we can all agree and which is offered to the Government in good faith.

[Caroline Lucas]

I rise to speak to new clause 6, which is in my name. Its intention is to ensure that those seeking public money for economic development under this legislation are obliged to undertake a climate and nature emergency impact assessment.

The powers set out in part 6 of the Bill provide assistance in a way that would be subject to very few restrictions. New clause 6 is designed to be a genuinely constructive and practical suggestion to help Ministers see the serious gap in the legislation, and to help them to assess and decide whether the money they are dishing out is trashing the environment or supporting its restoration.

Both the Under-Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the hon. Member for Sutton and Cheam (Paul Scully), earlier this afternoon, and the Minister of State, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Norwich North (Chloe Smith), last week, said that the UK Government have a determination to see climate and environmental goals achieved. Well, I am very glad to hear that, but it makes me even more perplexed that they are not willing to accept what I regard as a helpful and friendly amendment. In fact, both Ministers have also said that it was not necessary to introduce any kind of conditions on the financial assistance powers in the Bill, because apparently there is already an overarching legal and policy framework for achieving those goals. That is not good enough. We need commitments that would make those fine words actually bite when it comes to the wide financial assistance decisions set out in the Bill.

The Bill has conferred astoundingly broad powers on Ministers, but without clarity or direction over the mechanisms that they will use to judge whether they are upholding policy commitments—and vague references to overarching frameworks just will not cut it. The bottom line is that, in order to tackle the nature and climate emergencies that we face, the state must not risk supporting projects, companies or industries that threaten to undermine progress toward meeting climate, nature and environmental goals and targets. To avoid that risk, people need to be asking and proving how their requests measure up to climate, nature and environmental goals and targets, and the Government need to check.

The production of impact statements for any proposal for financial assistance will not only help to ensure that individual projects consider long-term sustainability, including avoiding or mitigating potential negative impacts, and maximising the benefits of delivering a green economy; it will also enable Governments across the UK to better understand the aggregate impacts of such financial assistance, and measure them against the goals and targets to which they have already committed themselves. In other words, impact statements would be not an additional burden, but a necessity to reach stated goals. They would also provide a useful opportunity to demonstrate the positive impact that ambitious and well directed investment can bring. The statements would help Ministers—and, indeed, all of us—by providing the benefits of public accountability and value for money, as well as important integrated policy making to tackle the nature and climate crises.

Let us not forget that we have had so many commitments —at least in fine words—from this Government on keeping high standards post Brexit. The Conservative party manifesto promised

“the most ambitious environmental programme of any country on earth.”

It is extraordinary that a Government who say that balk when it comes to any practical measure that would enable them to implement that commitment.

Just yesterday, the Prime Minister’s comments at the signing ceremony of the Leaders’ Pledge for Nature sounded positive. He said that we need to turn words into action, and I could not agree with him more. He said that we need ambitious goals and binding targets and, in his characteristic language:

“We cannot afford dither and delay because biodiversity loss is happening today.”

Yes, Prime Minister, it is, and this straightforward measure would enable him to deliver on the fine words by supporting a mechanism that is designed to achieve exactly that. Otherwise, words are cheap.

New clause 6 is not just a “nice to have” or a green add on; it is a vital way of ensuring that we implement our existing commitments. In May last year, Parliament passed a motion declaring a climate emergency. Marvellous —I was the first to be pleased about that, but we need a mechanism to ensure that subsequent policy making is in line with that commitment. Otherwise, it is meaningless. We have heard time and again how post Brexit, the UK will be able to have higher environmental standards than the EU, yet the next round of European structural funds will have tackling climate change and addressing the just transition as a major theme. Surely at the very least we should aspire to do the same.

Evidence that we must act responsibly and urgently is mounting every day. As I have already said, the UK Government are failing to meet as many as 17 of the 20 biodiversity targets that we set ourselves 10 years ago. We have plenty of examples of money that is being spent in a way that undermines environmental sustainability, so we know we need to act.

Just this morning, Professor Simon Lewis of University College London reminded us that the biodiversity crisis is not a problem in someone else’s backyard; it is happening in the UK. We live in one of the most nature depleted countries on earth. We have lost 55% of our forest birds in 50 years, and 97% of our flower-rich meadows since the second world war. We have just 13% woody cover, compared with an EU average of 38%. Scientists regularly document huge declines in beetles, bees, butterflies, moths and ladybirds.

Those things do not happen by accident. They happen as a direct result of public policy. They happen as a direct result of where money is spent. It is therefore critical that, if and when Ministers choose to exercise the powers in the Bill, they do so in a way that is consistent and compatible with any environmental and climate goals and targets in the relevant part of the UK.

I know time is short, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I want to say how much I support new clause 1, which has been tabled in the name of the shadow Business Secretary, the right hon. Member for Doncaster North (Edward Miliband). His powerful speech to the House on Second Reading left the Prime Minister embarrassed and exposed. Embarrassed because this is frankly all a bit of a game for a Prime Minister who does not like to lose, and exposed because the Prime Minister is at least supposed to uphold international law. In this case he is asking Parliament to give his Government authorisation to break a treaty that he negotiated and signed last year, and on which his whole general election campaign was based. You almost couldn’t make it up, but that comes after the Prorogation scandal, and a string of attacks on civil servants and the operations of our democracy, delivered by a Prime Minister who thinks little of shutting down Parliament when it gets in his way.

Under any Government of principle, new clause 1 would not be contentious, but sadly it is needed tonight because the Government’s amendment still leaves us with a Bill that clearly authorises Ministers to break international law. This is not a matter of left or right, or of leaving or remaining in Europe; this is about our democracy. To vote for the “treaty undercut” clauses in this group is not to provide a safety net, as the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster desperately suggested yesterday. Instead, it is to fire a cannon ball through the safety net of democratic principle. By contrast, new clause 1 gives MPs the opportunity to demonstrate the immovable principle that it is outrageous for any Prime Minister, any Attorney General, any Justice Secretary—indeed, it should be out of the question for any MP—to be part of legislation that authorises Ministers to break the rule of law. So I hope that every Member of the House will vote for new clause 1, and against the indefensible precedent that the Government seek to set.

Government amendment 13 is yet another attempt by the Government to avoid scrutiny of their actions, this time by the courts. It is basic to our way of life and to our history that no one is above the law, but clause 45 is a crude attempt to put Ministers above the law. Not only are Ministers seeking the power to legislate in breach of international law, but Parliament is being asked to pass a law whose aim is obviously to prevent any effective constraint on Ministers. This should be out of the question for any Government with any respect for the rule of law. Again, none of the Law Officers, no Minister and no MP should be prepared to vote for such an attack on the basic principles of our constitution.