Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 12th December 2023 Commons Chamber

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP)]

I wish to speak to the reasoned amendment that stands in my name and that of my hon. Friends.

Before I do so, I want to remark on the tragic news that has emerged that an asylum seeker aboard the Bibby Stockholm was found dead this morning. We do not know yet what the cause was, and we sympathise for that person and everybody who loved them, but what I do know is that our words and our policies in this place have consequences. We should all reflect on that in the debate.

The UK’s approach to migration, both legal and illegal, has been nothing short of chaotic, with poisonous rhetoric swirling around the plight of the world’s most vulnerable at the channel on a stormy night. Let me take a moment to reflect on how the Tories have brought us to this parlous state. A former Home Secretary, the right hon. Member for Maidenhead (Mrs May), doubled down on Labour’s hostile environment policy in a speech 11 long years ago. She promised to make life really difficult for those who came to our shores, deporting first and hearing appeals later. The Immigration Acts of 2014 and 2016 fostered a toxic culture of suspicion and disbelief in the Home Office, turning health staff, employers and landlords into border guards. That led to the Windrush scandal, the test of English for international communication scandal, and lives fractured and still not put back together. It led to “Go home” vans and the highly skilled migrants paragraph 322(5) scandal. It led to people being forcibly removed despite having done nothing wrong. It led directly to the dehumanisation found by the Brook House inquiry and to the rampant spread of covid and scabies in Napier barracks.

The Tories tightened up on the lorries, and then we had small boats. The talk got ever tougher. The cry of “Stop the boats” went out, and the Nationality and Borders Act 2022 came and went. The boats kept coming. The Illegal Migration Act 2023 was passed and, oddly enough, did not prove to be much of a deterrent, either. Today, we have the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill before us, which the Tories claim will be the one to do it. Well, they think that the third time is the charm, so maybe it will or maybe it will not. I am not terribly convinced, but the permanent secretary told a Committee yesterday that there is no evidence that it will be a deterrent, either.

This is policy in a death spiral, tougher and tougher, turning the screw and threatening people with rendition flights to Rwanda. It will not work, because nothing the Government have done before has worked. Why? Because it does not deal with the reason why people are coming here.

People will continue to put themselves in small boats because they feel there is no alternative. They come to reunite with family because of historical ties and because of the English language. It is all too easy to dehumanise, to speak of scourges, swarms and hordes, to speak of those who try to come here with no papers as somehow wanting to cheat the system and skip the queue. As the MP with the highest immigration caseload in Scotland, I see many of those people referred to by Ministers at my surgeries week in, week out. I have to look them in the eye, as I know so many Tory Members do not have to. I have 138 outstanding immigration cases—would the Home Secretary care to look at his inbox once in a while?

I will speak instead briefly about some of my constituents. I will call the first constituent Mohammed, to protect his anonymity. He came here from Sudan and got refugee status. He applied for his wife to come and, after nine months of waiting for that application, he came to my surgery in March. In April, conflict broke out in Sudan. His wife’s family fled to Egypt, but, because her paperwork was in the closed visa application centre, she could not go. In May, I was told that the case was allocated to a decision maker but that the visa application centre in Khartoum was still closed. By October, the case was still with a decision maker, but there was no timescale for a decision, I was told.

On Friday, Mohammed came to my advice surgery to show me pictures of a gunshot wound to his wife’s leg and video footage of those who had been killed in the same incident. I ask Tory Members what they would do if it was their wife. There is no safe and legal route from Sudan, and the family reunion route is demonstrably not working in the face of an ongoing conflict. Would they advise her to sit tight and wait for a year and a half for the appropriate paperwork, or should she try to cross international borders, by whatever means, to get to her husband and to safety in Glasgow? She is not wanting to skip the queue; she just wants the paperwork done by the Home Office.

How about the constituents who I will call Mr and Mrs R? They were unlucky enough to be visiting family in Afghanistan with their five children when it fell. With significant difficulty and scant assistance from UK officials, they were eventually able to return to Glasgow several months later, yet they contact me regularly about the family members they had had to leave behind. Despite the much-touted Afghan schemes, there is no route for them. Their relatives fled to Pakistan and had to leave everything behind, including their paperwork. The Government of Pakistan are now sending people back to Afghanistan—into the hands of the very Taliban they fled from. I ask Tory Members again: what would they advise Mr and Mrs R’s family to do? Should they ask the Taliban for a passport, wait for the Taliban to come to their door, wait for the Pakistani Government to arrest them, or should they try another route?

It is no accident that Afghans make up the greatest number of people in small boats. As Safe Passage has pointed out, in the first nine months of this year, just 279 Afghans came through official routes. For every person arriving through the Afghan schemes, 17 Afghans are crossing the channel in a small boat. This week, we have heard about how the Afghan relocations and assistance policy is leaving those who served with our armed forces at risk of execution.

I recently travelled with the Home Affairs Committee to hear more about what is happening in France and Belgium and their response to small boat crossings. The French Red Cross said that it works with the young unaccompanied asylum seekers it finds who are trying to cross the channel to reach family members in the UK. It tries to convince them of the merits of a family reunion application, but the backlog is so long and the casework so slow that they will inevitably wait for many months. Members in this place tend to forget that the channel is not the beginning of somebody’s journey but the end; it is the last leg. The channel holds little fear, given the dangerous journeys that some have already made to be here. It could not be more tempting to know that they are so nearly to safety.

If a humanitarian travel document existed, those same young people could avoid the perilous journey in a leaky rubber dinghy. They could get the same train or ferry that many millions of travellers do every year. They would not need to pay people smugglers at all—that would kill the business model at a stroke. It is the denial of that logical option that is placing people in danger. What are the Government offering instead? They are saying, “If you make that long and dangerous journey to our shores, your case will not be heard at all and you may be sent to Rwanda.”

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

The hon. Member is making an excellent speech and bringing real humanity to the debate. Is she aware that the people in Calais who are trying to cross the channel are homeless, poor, desperate, and often victims of war and human rights abuses, and that walking away from international law and international conventions will not offer protection to them or to any other desperate people in the world and will send a terrible message to the rest of the world that this country is turning its back on the international law that it established in 1948?

[Alison Thewliss]

The right hon. Gentleman makes an excellent point. Through the Bill, this country is turning its back on its international obligations. It is a pathetic excuse for policy—a foghorn signalling to the far right. It is too weak for some of the Home Secretary’s colleagues, but too harsh for a few exceptional others. For all the talk of full fat versus semi-skimmed, it is more akin to milk that has gone stagnant and sour—utterly repellent to decent people and best binned altogether, for everyone’s safety. For the SNP, the Bill is an abhorrence that undermines the UK’s international obligations and the principles of human rights. It costs a fortune and it is highly unlikely to achieve even its tawdry aims. We shall be tabling a prayer against the Rwanda treaty.

The legal experts I have heard from are appalled by the implications of proceeding with a Bill that, by the Home Secretary’s own frontispiece to it, cannot be declared compliant with the ECHR. The Home Secretary claims that he respects the Supreme Court’s decisions, but he comes here today with the sole purpose of overturning them and preventing the Court from ruling on anything ever again. For a Government to disapply human rights when it suits them, and instruct courts and public bodies to do likewise, is deeply troubling.

Liberty has stated that the Bill will

“tie the hands of every court in the UK while also abandoning the UK’s international commitments”.

Far be it from me to be concerned about the UK’s constitution or standing in the world, but I note that the Law Society of Scotland has questioned the UK’s rationale in disapplying a range of human rights agreements dating back 70 years, and the global implications of that departure from the international rights order. The Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, Justice and Freedom from Torture say that the Bill

“sends a devastating signal to the world about the UK’s reliability as an international partner”.

The Bill also begs the question whether breaking international law is something that the Rwandan Government would accept. Minister Vincent Biruta reportedly said:

“Without lawful behaviour by the UK, Rwanda would not be able to continue with the Migration and Economic Development Partnership.”

It is beneath contempt for the UK Government on the one hand to say, “We are presenting a treaty with Rwanda—marvel at how solid and unbreakable it is,” while, on the other, to tell us that they want to breach the human rights convention, the refugee convention, the 1966 international covenant on civil and political rights, the 1984 United Nations convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, the Council of Europe convention on action against trafficking in human beings agreed at Warsaw on 16 May 2005, as well as customary international law and any other laws that might get in their way, including from the European Court of Human Rights.

International law is binding: no welching, no backsies, no keys up. The Government are supposed to adhere to it; that is why they signed up to it in the first place. This is abject nonsense. The Law Society of England and Wales goes further, stating clearly that

“domestic legislation cannot immunise the Government from the enforcement of international law. To claim it can is disingenuous”.

It also states that refusing to comply with an interim measure would be a

“clear and serious breach of international law.”

It accuses the UK Government of using law to manufacture a reality. It is the time of year that we all indulge in some Christmas magic and imagine reindeers on the roof, but this UK Tory Government have asked the entire United Kingdom legal system to engage in a far more dangerous pretence.

The UK Supreme Court sought out the facts for itself and, upon clear and substantial evidence, found Rwanda to be unsafe. That seems most likely why the Government want to ban courts from doing that again, via this legislation. The Court spoke of the risk of refoulement and of sending people back into harm’s way. Indeed, if Rwanda were safe, why would it be able to send asylum seekers to the UK as part of the deal? The Rwandan opposition leader Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza was sentenced to 15 years in jail for speaking out against the Rwandan Government. Despite being released in 2018, to this day she still cannot exercise her political rights. She had to criticise the deal in the international media, because she says that the local media dare not give her a platform.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

3rd reading
Wednesday 17th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I was first elected to this House on the same day as Tony Lloyd in 1983. He was a brilliant friend and comrade who voted against the Iraq war, student tuition fees and the renewal of Trident, and he was a brilliant shadow Northern Ireland Secretary. He will be much missed by many good people all over this country.

This Bill is an appalling piece of legislation. It fails to take any account of the human suffering of people who are forced, through lack of any other alternative, to try to make a very dangerous crossing of the channel. I have met people in Calais who are desperate, poor and confused, and have travelled from Afghanistan and other places. They are victims of war, human rights abuse, poverty and so much else. The Government are now claiming that the only way to deal with the issue is to attack what they euphemistically call “a foreign court”, when in reality that court is the European Court of Human Rights, which is part of our judicial system. They are trying to offshore their obligations under international law and treaties.

On the global stage, it is the wealthy countries, such as Australia and Britain, that want to offshore issues surrounding asylum and the rights of people to seek asylum, and pretend that somehow or other they are doing the world a favour. We have to work with other countries to deal with the issue of the desperation of so many refugees in Europe, and far more in other parts of the world.

The Bill blames those people for being victims and plays into the narrative of the most backward, horrible remarks made in our national media and newspapers about asylum seekers, without ever recognising that those people who have sought asylum legally in this country—it is always legal to seek asylum; that is there in treaty—will eventually be our doctors, lawyers, teachers and engineers of tomorrow, as they are all over Europe. The Bill plays into this racist trope against refugees all over the world, and attacks refugees because of where they come from.

I hope that the House tonight rejects this Bill. I hope that, in future, we do not come back to this kind of debate, but instead start to look at the issues of human rights abuse, victims of war, victims of environmental disaster and the needs of those people to be cared for on this planet as fellow human beings, rather than making them out to be the enemies that they certainly are not. Desperate people are looking for a place of safety. Surely it is our obligation—[Interruption.] The Home Secretary is getting very excited, but it is his obligation to try to make sure that they do have a place of safety in which to survive for the rest of their lives.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Consideration of Lords message
Monday 15th April 2024 Commons Chamber

[Beth Winter (Cynon Valley) (Lab)]

I rise in support of the Lords amendments, which I will vote to retain this evening. I will keep my comments brief. I want to express the need for the House to support Lords amendment 6B. It has already been said that under the Government’s preferred wording for clause 4, a court still cannot consider the risk of refoulement by Rwanda in contravention of any of its international obligations, even though that was the very risk highlighted by the UK Supreme Court. The amendment would reinstate the protection that the Government wish to remove. It would omit clause 4 and replace it with a clause that seeks to restore the ability of decision makers to consider whether Rwanda is a safe country. It would restore the jurisdiction of domestic courts and tribunals to grant interim relief—a temporary injunction preventing a removal.

During the most recent Lords consideration, the previous version of amendment 6B, which was rejected by this House, was changed. It now adds the stipulation that any interim relief be for

“no longer than strictly necessary for the fair and expeditious determination of the case.”

The Member who tabled the amendment in the other House, Baroness Chakrabarti, said that it is a “significant concession” and a “genuine legislative olive branch” to the Executive. The Executive should accept that it is an improvement to the Bill and that, rather than neutering the powers of decision makers or the courts, it would allow for better decision making in the asylum process.

It remains my firm view that the Bill is an affront to international law, human rights and the rule of law more widely. It sets a dangerous precedent to other nations who wish to ignore the law, cause harm and demonise and exploit vulnerable people who are in desperate need.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

My hon. Friend will be aware that many people all over Europe, particularly in the Council of Europe, have expressed grave concern about this piece of legislation, which outsources our international obligations under all aspects of humanitarian law. If we pass this legislation, many others will follow, and Europe will turn its back on refugee problems that, often, it has helped to create.

[Beth Winter]

I fully agree that the Bill sets a dangerous precedent. I am pleased to say that the disgracefulness of this legislation is recognised by the Welsh Government, who have withheld legislative consent on similar draconian pieces of legislation and describe this Bill as cruel, inhumane, unworkable and unethical. It sets a horrific precedent for other countries to follow. I am so proud that we are looking to establish Wales as a nation of sanctuary, where we welcome, understand and celebrate the unique contribution that asylum seekers fleeing horrific situations can make to our country of Cymru.

The Bill is an assault on our checks and balances, and our scrutiny of powers. Quite frankly, it is unamendable and should be thrown out wholesale, but given that that is unlikely to happen, in a true attempt to make a bad Bill less bad, I will support amendment 6B and the other amendments before the House this evening.

--- Later in debate ---

[John McDonnell (Hayes and Harlington) (Lab)]

I only want to make four brief points, which are based on my experience in my own constituency. At the height of the number of asylum seekers being placed in hotels, I think I had the largest number—I think I still have. I had 2,500 asylum seekers in my constituency. I welcomed that; I welcomed them into our community. Our community in Hayes and Harlington has always risen to support people in need, and I was proud of the local community. There are four points I want to raise from the lessons of dealing with those asylum seekers, touring around the hotels and dealing with casework. In fact, one of the hotels is next to my constituency office.

One point is the point made by the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron): these are desperate people—desperate people—and they will not be deterred from coming here, having experienced what they have experienced back in their home country and the way in which they have travelled here. Given the desperate circumstances they are in, in both instances, they will not be deterred by this legislation. They know, as we do, that this is a political stunt rather than anything else.

[Jeremy Corbyn]

I thank my right hon. Friend for giving way on that point. It has been my privilege to visit Calais on a number of occasions over the past few years and I have had many conversations with people there. They are desperate; they are poor; they are hungry; they are homeless; they are victims of war and human rights abuses; and they are being treated as though they are enemies of the whole community here. They are not. They are people trying to survive in a very difficult world, and our message seems to be the opposite of all the humanitarian law that has been passed into common parlance over the past 70 years.

[John McDonnell]

The other lesson I have learnt from meeting a wide range of asylum seekers—and this, in a sense, follows on from what my right hon. Friend has said—relates to the skills they can bring to our country, and how desperate they are to make a contribution. All they want is for their cases to be processed, because the vast majority, even those detained in the two detention centres in my constituency, will win their cases and be received into the community. Their problem is that the processing situation means they cannot travel here through the normal processing arrangements, and when they do get here they are having to wait for up to two years just to have their cases heard. I do not think that the provisions in the Bill will deter desperate people from coming here in this way.

My second point concerns the amendment relating to the assessment of children. The hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), who is not present now, mentioned me because we both represent the London Borough of Hillingdon, which has accepted more unaccompanied children than any other borough because of its proximity to Heathrow. We have had a problem with age assessments, but it is not the problem that the media home in on, which is elderly people being assessed as children; it is the other way round. Children are being forced through a process that can be very demeaning and can have an impact on their mental health, and then are eventually found to be children, as all the statistics demonstrate. It is a brutal system. All that the amendment would do is ensure that assessments are carried out by those who are experienced in the process, namely local authorities.