Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Debate between John McDonnell and Caroline Lucas

Consideration of Lords amendments
Monday 18th March 2024 Commons Chamber

[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.