Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 4th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, my name would have been on the amendment of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, but I was not quite agile enough to get in as number four. The treaty provides at Article 13 that

“Rwanda shall have regard to information provided about a Relocated Individual relating to any special needs that may arise as a result of their being a victim of modern slavery or human trafficking, and shall take all necessary steps to ensure that these needs are accommodated”.


If the Home Office rushes through its processes, as it will under the legislation of 2022 and 2023, I doubt that the individual needs will be adequately identified. It is hard enough to do even under the pre-2022 procedures.

Of course, what Rwanda is told is necessary and what it actually can provide are not necessarily the same thing, as has been covered pretty fully today. Its record is not exemplary. Just last year, the 2023 US Trafficking in Persons Report of 2023 told us that Rwanda

“did not refer any victims to services”.

That there were none is, to me, literally incredible.

The report also refers to widespread cultural prejudice, as we have just heard, along with a lack of capacity and resources that inhibits effective procedures, and so on. Referring to the words of the treaty as if that made them actually happen seems simply an extension of the argument of “The legislation says that Rwanda is safe and it therefore is”. What assessment have the Government made of the risks of Rwanda being safe in this respect? What assessment have they made of its capacity to provide services? Do they accept that Rwanda is able carefully to assess each individual’s risk of being re-trafficked? The risk in this country is enough—my goodness, what must it be there? Indeed, what assessment have they made of how those people sent to Rwanda by Israel disappeared? Common sense gives me a likely answer.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 44 in this group, which is in my name and supported by the noble and gallant Lords, Lord Stirrup and Lord Houghton of Richmond, and the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard. Before turning further to Amendment 44, I say that I support the amendments in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, and the amendment in the name of the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss. I have had the benefit of hearing about these amendments in Committee and today in your Lordships’ House. I do not plan to say anything further on this, but I cannot for the life of me understand why the Government’s attitude to those who have been trafficked or other victims of modern slavery should be that they were in control of their own decision-making and to categorise them as such, when manifestly they were not. I also support Amendments 31 and 32 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, which I am sure she will speak to immediately after I sit down, and Amendment 25 in the name of my noble friend Lord Dubs.

As the explanatory statement in relation to Amendment 44 makes clear, the new clause proposed by this amendment would exempt from removal to Rwanda people who are in a very special case: those who put themselves in harm’s way in support of His Majesty’s Armed Forces or through working with or for the UK Government overseas. It extends this exemption to their partners and dependants. In Committee on 14 February, responding to a debate on this amendment, the Minister said:

“Of course, we greatly value the contribution of those who have supported us and our Armed Forces overseas, and we have accepted our moral obligation. … Anyone eligible for the Afghan relocations and assistance policy and Afghan citizens resettlement scheme should apply to come to the UK legally under those routes. As regards the specific case of British Council personnel, they are qualified under the third pathway of the ACRS and places are offered to them”.—[Official Report, 14/2/24; cols. 287-88.]


I know and admire the Minister, and he is correct, but his restatement of the eligibility framework and criteria for these schemes does not engage, never mind undermine, the necessity for this exemption. It is clear that we have a moral duty to those who have served at our behest and in our interests. However, despite serving shoulder to shoulder with British troops, most of the Triples were not evacuated in August 2021, and many have subsequently been rejected under the ARAP scheme. We know now that they were rejected because of misunderstandings on the part of decision-makers of the terms of ARAP and, often, the nature of the service of the applicants, despite the existence of compelling evidence to the contrary, and there is now credible evidence suggesting that the UK Special Forces department blocked eligible applicants from being accepted. The group was refused wrongly by the bureaucracy or blocked for self-serving, venal reasons by the country’s Special Forces, whose Government and Ministers have a moral obligation to promise them, and still promises them, sanctuary.

It comes to this: many applied for the status that would allow them a legal route to resettlement in the UK. They were refused in error. Then, fearing what materialised as their comrades were murdered or tortured by the Taliban, they faced the choice of staying in Afghanistan and facing certain death or getting here somehow. They chose to get here somehow. They were in extremis and had no alternative. There was no legal route open to them because of our failures. In Committee, I shared accounts of the experience of five Afghans who were driven to this extreme and acted accordingly. I do not intend to repeat them but they are freely available in open source media, and I am sure many others will become apparent over time.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

Is that correct? It sounds very moot to me, legally. I said that Rwanda must

“have regard to information provided about a Relocated Individual relating to any special needs that may arise as a result of their being a victim of modern slavery or human trafficking, and … take all necessary steps to ensure that these needs are accommodated”.

That sounds very much the same to me.

All relocated individuals, including potential and confirmed victims of modern slavery, will receive appropriate protection and assistance according to their needs, including referral to specialist services, as appropriate, to protect their welfare. So it is simply not correct to assert that the Government do not care.

Finally, if, despite those safeguards, an individual considers that Rwanda would not be safe for them, Clause 4 means that decision-makers may consider a claim on such grounds, other than in relation to alleged onward refoulement, if such a claim is based on compelling evidence relating specifically to the person’s individual particular circumstances, rather than on the ground that Rwanda is not a safe country in general.

I turn to Amendment 44, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Browne of Ladyton, and spoken to by the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup. Although this amendment is well intentioned, it gives rise to the possibility that criminal gangs operating in northern France and across Europe will exploit this carve-out as a marketing model to encourage small boat illegal entry to the UK. The terms “agents, allies and employees” will likely result in people who have arrived illegally falsely claiming to be former agents and allies as a tactic to delay their removal, completely undermining this policy’s priority to stop the boats and promptly remove them, either to their home country or to a safe third country such as Rwanda.

The Government deeply value the support of those who have stood by us and our Armed Forces overseas. As a result, there are established legal routes for them to come to the UK. For example, those who enlist and serve in His Majesty’s Armed Forces are exempt from immigration control until they are discharged from regular service. After this time, non-UK HM Armed Forces personnel can apply for settlement under the Immigration Rules on discharge when their exemption from immigration control ends.

There are also provisions for family members of HM Armed Forces personnel to come to the UK legally. Anyone eligible for the Afghan relocations and assistance policy and the Afghan citizens resettlement scheme should apply to come to the UK legally under those routes.

I take what the noble Lord, Lord Browne, and the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Stirrup, say very seriously, and His Majesty’s Government regret that so many cases need to be reassessed. The MoD is taking the necessary steps to ensure that all future decisions are made in accordance with the enhanced guidance being produced for the review to which the noble Lord, Lord Browne, referred. This was recently announced by the Defence Secretary and while many former members of Afghan specialist units, including the Triples, have been found eligible under ARAP and safely relocated to the UK with their families, a recent review of processes around eligibility decisions demonstrated instances of inconsistent application of ARAP criteria in certain cases. In light of that, the MoD is taking the necessary steps to ensure that the ARAP criteria are applied consistently through reassessments of all eligibility decisions made on ineligible applications with credible claims of links to Afghan specialist units on a case-by-case basis.

This review will move as quickly as possible, but we recognise that ARAP applications from this cohort present a unique set of challenges in assessing their eligibility. These units reported directly into the Government of Afghanistan, which means that HMG do not hold employment records or comprehensive information in the same way we do for many other applicants. It is essential that the MoD ensures this is done right and provides the opportunity for applicants to provide further information—which I note can sometimes take time—from these individuals.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

Will the Minister answer the question I asked in February when this review was announced: will anyone who is eligible for ARAP but was told they were ineligible—and acted in a way in which a small number of them did in extremis to protect themselves from possible death—be disqualified from being allowed to become eligible on review? Will they be excluded from the requirement of the Illegal Migration Act and this Bill if it becomes law that they must be deported to Rwanda?

[Lord Sharpe of Epsom (Con)]

As I understand it, they will be deported to Rwanda.

In conclusion, the Government of Rwanda have systems in place to safeguard relocated individuals with a range of vulnerabilities. The Bill already includes adequate safeguards which allow decision-makers to consider certain claims that Rwanda is unsafe for an individual due to their particular—