Immigration Bill

Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendments 56ZA to—

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (CB)]

My Lords, my name is on the amendment so I wish to speak to it.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett]

I also have an amendment in the group. I shall speak to Amendments 56ZA to 56ZD in this group. They have been tabled with colleagues from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which recommended them. They also reflect concerns raised in a joint briefing from the Equality and Human Rights Commission, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission and the Scottish Human Rights Commission. But I should make it clear first that I would prefer Amendment 56 to be successful so that these amendments would become redundant. Indeed, these amendments reinforce the case for Amendment 56 because they underline how a number of key human rights issues remain unresolved. As the commissions observed, the consequences of having and using the power proposed in Clause 64 have not been carefully and thoroughly considered in respect of the UK’s compliance with its international and domestic human rights law obligations. I fear that this remains the case despite the welcome government Amendment 56A. It should not be the responsibility of an independent reviewer to put right defective legislation once it is in operation.

Amendment 56ZA seeks to ensure that any deprivation of citizenship is consistent with the UK’s obligations under international law. There has been some confusion in our debates so far as to what is meant by this. The JCHR accepts that Clause 64 is compatible with our obligations under UN conventions on statelessness, and not surprisingly the Government have prayed this in aid. But, in doing so, they have conveniently overlooked the JCHR’s concern that exercising the power in relation to a naturalised British citizen while they are abroad carries with it a very great risk of breaching the UK’s international obligations to the state which admitted that British citizen to its territory. These two points were at times conflated during our debates in Committee.

The Government’s legal position is that subject to one very limited exception, there is no general entitlement in international law for a state to deport a non-British citizen to the UK. On the other hand, Professor Goodwin-Gill, an acknowledged authority on the subject and already cited by the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has said that the Government’s position on general international law is “manifestly incorrect”. This is not the place to go into disputes of legal interpretation, and as a non-lawyer I am certainly not the person to do so, but the point is that if fine legal minds are in dispute about whether it is compatible with international law to denationalise a citizen while they are abroad, surely it makes sense to allow a Joint Committee of both Houses to consider the matter before the proposal goes any further.

At this point I want also to put on the record the JCHR’s disappointment that the Government continue to refuse to inform Parliament about the number of cases in which the power to deprive a person of their citizenship has been exercised while that person is abroad. How can statistics affect national security? When the JCHR put this question to the independent reviewer in a recent public session, he responded by saying:

“My sympathies are very much with your request. If they will not tell them to you, I can only assume that they would tell them at least to a security cleared reviewer, who might in turn be able to make a recommendation that they may be released more widely”.

Will the Minister give a commitment now to make those statistics available to the independent reviewer, who he has said may indeed be given the power of review proposed in Amendment 56A?

Amendment 56ZB requires that the deprivation of citizenship is a necessary and proportionate response to an individual’s conduct. I would have thought that that was a rather basic safeguard for such a draconian power. The committee welcomed the Government’s indication that they would adopt a proportionality approach to deciding whether to exercise the power to deprive someone of their citizenship regardless of whether that would risk statelessness, but we believe that the importance of the concepts of necessity and proportionality as safeguards against arbitrariness are such that they should be in the Bill as conditions which have to be satisfied before the Secretary of State makes a deprivation order. We believe that this could make a real and practical difference in particular cases.

We also noted that it was hard to imagine the circumstances in which such a serious measure could ever be a necessary and proportionate response to a threat to the country’s economic well-being, as has been indicated by the Government. In Committee, the Minister promised to write to me with an example of when this might happen. I do not believe that I have received that example, so I should be grateful if he could provide it today on the record.

Amendment 56ZC would remove the retrospective power contained in the clause. The Government response to the Committee’s objection to this exceptional constitutional step was that a person does not have a legitimate claim of being unaware of the potential consequence of their actions because the person who would come within the scope of this new power would already be liable to being deprived of citizenship under existing powers. The only thing that prevents that now is that such a decision would leave them stateless. Is not that “only thing” rather an important thing? The Government response makes light of the fact that it is the law that currently prevents a person being deprived of citizenship if it made that person stateless. Surely a citizen should be entitled to rely on what the law said at the time of their action? Again, this is an issue that a Joint Committee could usefully address.

Finally, Amendment 56ZD requires that this decision,

“must take into account the best interests of any child affected”.

No doubt the Minister will point to the very welcome Amendment 58 that explicitly writes the Section 55 children’s duty into the Bill. However, Section 55 applies only to children who are in the UK. Thus the duty would not apply if the child affected—who may be a British citizen—happens to be abroad at the time, as is quite possible. A child is a child, wherever that child happens to be. I cannot believe that a Government who have repeatedly reiterated their belief in the best interest principle are really saying that that principle does not apply if the child happens to be out of the country.

I made it clear at the outset that the best way to resolve the issues raised by the JCHR is through the appointment of a Joint Committee as provided for by Amendment 56. Indeed the JCHR itself complained about the lack of public consultation and its detrimental impact on the parliamentary scrutiny of this clause. As the noble Lord, Lord Deben, said in Committee,

“statelessness is one of the most terrible things that can befall anyone”.—[Official Report, 19/3/14; col. 212.]

The Minister has himself spoken of the evil of statelessness. In the words of Dr Matthew Gibney of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, to be stateless,

“may be a recipe for exclusion, precariousness and general dispossession”.

This will be the first measure adopted by the UK in recent years that would give rise directly to an increase in the number of stateless people in the world condemned to be dispossessed,

“without the right to have rights”,

as Hannah Arendt so memorably put it. This House has a duty to prevent this clause going any further without the full and detailed scrutiny it warrants by a committee of both Houses.

[Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood]

My Lords, that Clause 64 is highly contentious and far from obviously a good idea is perfectly plain. It is plain, indeed, from the Minister’s own recognition in Amendment 56A that a review of its operation will be required even if the provision is enacted. The critical difference between the Government’s amendment and our own is that we say that there should be no such drastic provision enacted as this without its first being subjected to full and proper consideration, and that of course would happen under our amendment. This really is a matter of fundamental principle.

It is true to say, as the Minister noted in Committee, that someone can already be made stateless if deprived of their citizenship having originally obtained naturalisation by fraud. That is perhaps understandable. The person would never have obtained British citizenship in the first place but for having committed fraud. To render stateless someone who has already properly gained citizenship by naturalisation is, I would suggest, quite another matter. Of course one must recognise that the power would arise only in respect of those who had betrayed the trust which we as a nation put in them when we granted them naturalisation and who now themselves create a risk to national security. For my part, I can readily see the temptation to say, “Well, they, too, therefore can properly be made stateless”. This is a temptation which I truly believe that, as a nation proud—and rightly proud—of our human rights record, we should resist.