Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Lord Blunkett Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 4th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Anderson of Ipswich (CB)]

My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 9 and address Amendment 12 in my name and those of my noble friend Lord Carlile, the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Manchester and the noble Lord, Lord Clarke of Nottingham. I will be brief, because the equivalent amendments were discussed in detail in Committee. I am also very grateful to my noble and learned friend Lord Hope of Craighead for how he has dealt with pre-emption, which, your Lordships willing, may allow both groups of amendments to stay alive.

Amendment 9 would allow Ministers, officials and courts to depart from the presumption that Rwanda is safe when presented with credible evidence that it is not. Amendment 12 would remove various detailed barriers to that course. Their combined effect is to reverse two of the most revolutionary—I do not use that word in a positive sense— aspects of the Bill. They are the requirement for decision-makers, including courts, to stop their ears to any evidence that does not agree with the Government’s position and the requirement that they should do so for an indefinite period, even if things in Rwanda—as we all hope that they do not—take a turn for the worse.

If noble Lords are in any doubt about how truly remarkable Clause 2 is, I invite them to look at subsection (4). It does not matter how compelling your evidence is of what could happen to you and people like you when you get to Rwanda, it must not even be considered if it questions the proposition that Rwanda is safe.

Subsection (5) sets out the legal principles that have to be ignored to make this clause work—not just the Human Rights Act and international law but

“any other provision or rule of domestic law (including any common law)”—

an insight into the sheer range of legal protections, ancient and modern, that may have to be disregarded in the interests of avoiding the impartial scrutiny of the courts.

If Rwanda is safe, as the Government would have us declare, it has nothing to fear from such scrutiny, yet we are invited to adopt a fiction, to wrap it in the cloak of parliamentary sovereignty and to grant it permanent immunity from challenge—to tell an untruth and call it truth. Why would we go along with that? Clause 2 takes us for fools. Subject to anything that the Minister may say, when these amendments are called, I fully expect to test the opinion of the House. I beg to move.

[Lord Blunkett (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise to support the noble Lord, Lord Anderson of Ipswich. I am glad that this evening I have started to understand the processes of the House of Lords, having been here only eight years. Therefore, I will not speak to Amendment 6, which had to be withdrawn in order to vote on Amendment 7, even though Amendment 6 was in group three, but there we go.

I can be even briefer than I intended to be, by just saying that when something is a nonsense, it remains a nonsense at whatever stage we happen to be voting on it. Crucially, in terms of what the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, has rightly said, when circumstances change, most people change their minds. If minds are not allowed to be changed when circumstances change, then we are all extremely foolish.

I heard the noble Lord, Lord Howard, on the radio this morning explaining in great detail why Parliament had primacy over the courts. In many respects, as with the doctrines of Lord Jonathan Sumption, I agree. However, when the Government step outside the norms of international conventions which Parliament has ratified and signed up to, then the courts obviously continue to have a substantial role, because those are the checks and balances we have built in.

This evening, we are trying to make sense of a nonsensical piece of legislation. No doubt the House of Commons will just nod through the Government’s rejection of these amendments, but in times to come, when historians look back, I think they will ask: “Where were you and what did you do?” If you cannot answer that in a way that makes you comfortable about your grandchildren seeing it, then do not do it.