Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Lord Archbishop of Canterbury Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 29th January 2024 Lords Chamber

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

My Lords, in almost every tradition of global faith and humanism around the world, the dignity of the individual is at the heart of what is believed. In the Christian tradition, we are told to welcome the stranger. Jesus said:

“I was a stranger and you invited me in”.


In numerous places in the Old Testament and the New, the commands of God are to care for the alien and stranger. It has already been said, and I agree, that the way that this Bill and its cousin, which we debated in the summer, work is by obscuring the truth that all people, asylum seekers included, are of great value. We can, as a nation, do better than this Bill.

With the Bill, the Government are continuing to seek good objectives in the wrong way, leading the nation down a damaging path. It is damaging for asylum seekers in need of protection and safe and legal routes to be heard. It is damaging for this country’s reputation, which the Government contradicted even as late as last week, when the Prime Minister himself spoke eloquently on the value and importance of international law for this country. It is damaging in respect of constitutional principles and the rule of law.

Most of all, it is damaging for our nation’s unity in a time when the greatest issues of war, peace, defence and security need us to be united. We are united on, I think, almost all Benches, in agreeing that the boats must be stopped. The Government are to be congratulated that the number has come down. We also agree that the people smugglers who trade in human misery must be brought to justice, and it is good news that so many of those groups have been broken up. We need to be united on effective controls on agreed limits to immigration. The right way forward, though, is to enable the unity on ends to be translated into a unity on means. That is not happening in the way that these Bills are successively brought to the House and before the country.

The challenge of migration is, as has been said, long-term and global. So must our response be. We need a wider strategy for refugee policy—I spoke on this at boring length in the summer and will not repeat it—that involves international co-operation and equips us for the far greater migration flows, perhaps 10 times greater, in the coming decades, as a result of conflict, climate change and poverty. Instead, the Bill offers only ad hoc, one-off approaches.

Rwanda is a country that I know well. It is a wonderful country, and my complaint is not with it, nor its people. It has overcome challenges that this House cannot begin to imagine. But, wherever it does it to, the Bill continues to outsource our legal and moral responsibilities to refugees and asylum seekers—when other, far poorer, countries are already supporting multitudes more than we are now—and to cut back on our aid. At the end of 2022, 76% of refugees globally were being hosted in low- and middle-income countries—countries far poorer than our own. The UK should lead internationally, as it has in the past, not stand apart.

Others on these Benches will say more about international and domestic law, human rights and the constitutional impact. I say simply that a pick-and-choose approach to international law undermines our global standing and offends against the principle of universality that is their increasingly threatened foundation.

Finally, my colleagues and I on these Benches take our revising role seriously. When we vote, we seek to improve something. I will—sadly—not be voting with those who want to vote the Bill down today, although I found the speech by the noble Lord, Lord German, convincing and powerful. We must wait until Third Reading and we have done our revising work. We on these Benches have been criticised many times over many decades by those thinking that defence of the Government of the day should be our highest virtue and aspiration. We were accused last week of voting against the Government’s Whip. I am sorry to say we do not take the Government’s Whip. It may be worse news for this House to recognise that on the Labour Benches it is not 95% of times that there has been a vote against the Government’s Whip—that is a false statistic—but 100%. Maybe they should be criticised for that obnoxious behaviour.

We serve on these Benches as independent Members. As recently as last Thursday, we were discussing what had happened in a particular vote and saw that we had cancelled each other out—bishops often cancel each other out in every possible way. We vote because we value deeply the traditions of this country and this House, and the truth we derive from the Bible and our service to Jesus Christ—our first priority. To misquote Luther, slightly: on that we stand. We can do no other.

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Lord Archbishop of Canterbury Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 4th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

As the noble Lord will be well aware, the treaty is directly reflective of all the Supreme Court’s concerns about the safety of Rwanda. The fact that there are refugees from a certain country does not mean that that country is of itself always and everywhere unsafe.

[The Archbishop of Canterbury]

My Lords, at this stage of the debate on this group, we are looking at two distinct things. One is the question of whether Rwanda is safe. If, as the noble Lord just said, it is unquestionably safe, it seems to me that these amendments are not a problem because, at that point, the Secretary of State can easily say, “It’s safe”, and they will have evidence of that, for this and future Governments.

However, the object of this group is the rule of law, which is the main subject we are looking at. Going back to the development of international human rights law, particularly in the period after 1945, there is a difficulty in totally separating domestic and international law. The rise in international human rights law grew out of the horrors of the 1940s. In 1933, the German Government were legally and properly elected, and passed horrific laws that did terrible things, starting from within a few weeks of the election of Adolf Hitler. That continued, and most historians agree that the first two elections gave the Nazi Party a legitimate majority.

Winston Churchill’s advocacy of the European Court of Human Rights after the Second World War grew up in order to give a fallback where domestic law was not doing the right thing, by linking it to international law and ensuring that there was a stop that said, “You can do this perfectly legitimately domestically, but that doesn’t mean it’s always right and always the right thing to do”. Let us be clear: we are not in a situation remotely like that. The Government are not doing something on the scale of what we saw at that stage. But they are challenging the right of international law to constrain our actions.

The point of international law is to stop Governments going ahead with things that are wrong. The noble Lord, Lord Lilley, made two very good points, particularly in his questions. But one thing I was brought up believing and even, believe it or not, something I was told when I was trained as a clergyman—we do get trained, although that may sound surprising from time to time—was that it is a basic rule of ethics and morality that two wrongs do not make a right. So the fact that we have done the wrong thing in the past does not automatically make it right today.

[Lord Tugendhat (Con)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the most reverend Primate. I begin by saying how much I agree with every word that my noble friends Lord Clarke and Lord Hailsham said about my old friend Patrick Cormack. He was a good man and will be very much missed. I cannot add to what they said, but I say this humbly and with great warmth.

At this stage of the proceedings, our task is to try to persuade the House of Commons to improve the Bill. Failing that, it is to draw attention to the implications of leaving the Bill as it is. I support this amendment, and others that will follow, because I believe that the failure to amend the Bill will have profound implications. The Government will, in fact, be behaving like the ruling party in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Normally, Nineteen Eighty-Four is invoked in relation to government behaviour, laws, events and so forth in tyrannies and dictatorships. This country is no dictatorship—it is a democracy. Nevertheless, in this Bill the Government are seeking to achieve by Act of Parliament what in Nineteen Eighty-Four the ruling party and its apparatchiks sought to achieve by torture.

Many noble Lords will remember the scene towards the end of the book in which Winston is being interrogated by O’Brien and is forced to say that Oceania is and always has been at war with Eastasia, although he knows for a fact that it was until recently at war with Eurasia. When O’Brien holds up four fingers, Winston is obliged to say that he sees five, as an act of obedience to the party. However many fingers O’Brien holds up, the answer is always the same—just as, whatever the evidence to the contrary, Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Likewise, with the Bill as it stands, it does not matter what the Supreme Court has said about the present or how conditions in Rwanda might evolve in future—the answer is always the same: Rwanda is a safe country. If the Bill goes on to the statute book in its present form, Rwanda will be a safe country, regardless of reality, until the statute is repealed.

Rather than going down that route, we should take our cue from what Margaret Thatcher told the House of Commons on 17 July 1984—as it happens—when a judge had held that a decision her Government had taken in connection with GCHQ was illegal. She said that

“I, rightly, cannot overturn the decision of a court, and I would not wish to do so … at the end of the judicial process Governments, of course, accept the courts’ final ruling. That is what the rule of law is all about”.—[Official Report, Commons, 17/7/1984; cols. 173-74.]