Illegal Migration Bill

Debate between Lord Cashman and Baroness Ludford

Committee stage
Wednesday 24th May 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cashman (Lab)]

My Lords, I speak in favour of the amendments in this group, including my Amendment 8; I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, for adding his name to it. My amendment deals specifically with Clause 2(4) and would include persecution of a person on the basis of gender, sexuality and gender identity for the purposes of the third condition under which a person could be removed. However, I wish to now speak against Clause 2 and the duty to deport.

As we have heard from other noble Lords, the Bill seeks to give unprecedented powers to the Home Secretary to deport people without even a fair hearing of their case. The Home Secretary is in fact compelled to carry out that duty, even when it conflicts with human rights protections. The Bill seeks to limit the circumstances in which legal challenges could prevent a removal and allows the Home Secretary to add or remove countries to the list of so-called safe countries. This is even more worrying, looking at Schedule 1. At present, four of the countries on that list are not signatories to the UN convention, and some may not even have a functional asylum system. I will come back to this later on a further grouping but, if a person were deported or returned to most of the countries on the list in Schedule 1, they would face discrimination on the grounds of their sexual orientation or gender identity. Nigeria is one that springs to mind.

Without the requirement to make individualised assessments about whether it is safe to remove a person seeking asylum, and in providing very limited opportunities for individuals to present evidence of the risks that they could face, there is a real concern that many refugees will be deported to a country where their safety is at risk, or returned to their home country where their life could be threatened again, as I have said. The refugee convention makes it clear that return is prohibited to any country where a refugee could face persecution and not just their own.

I return now to the thinking behind my own amendment. In passing through a so-called safe third country, I refer to the internationally accepted definition of a refugee, which makes reference to five possible grounds for persecution: race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion: UN General Assembly 1951, page 137. These grounds are also recognised as covering persecution on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity and gender-based human rights abuses.

Such examples also illustrate that persecution may happen where the state is not itself the perpetrator. Although some definitions have in the past required this, it is not universal. I believe it is therefore right to expand within the Bill the acceptance of individuals becoming refugees both when persecution is perpetrated by the state and where there is a failure of the state to provide protection against persecution by others. On that basis, I commend my amendment to noble Lords.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I will quickly speak on Amendment 12, otherwise I fear there will not be a second voice in support of the very important issue of the potential impact of the Bill in respect of Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission has pointed out that the human rights memorandum does not include an assessment of compliance of the Bill with Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, so my first question to the Minister is: will that memorandum be amended to include such an assessment?

The Bill raises significant concerns about compliance with the Belfast/Good Friday agreement and with the Windsor Framework, because the incorporation of the European Convention on Human Rights into Northern Ireland law was an explicit commitment of the Good Friday agreement and was achieved through the Human Rights Act. The Bill would constitute a breach of two core elements of this commitment: the guarantee of direct access to the courts and the obligation to provide remedies for breach of the convention, under the relevant chapter of the agreement. That chapter extends to everyone in the community, which includes asylum seekers and refugees.

I believe the Bill is also inconsistent with obligations under Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, which details various equality and non-discrimination EU directives with which Northern Ireland must keep pace. This includes the victims’ directive and the trafficking directive. The potential for the Bill to lead to failures in identifying and supporting trafficking victims, as well as the provisions on detention and removal, would place Northern Ireland in direct contravention of those directives. I believe that the Government’s explainer document on the Windsor Framework, Article 2, acknowledges that its protections apply to everyone who is subject to the law in Northern Ireland. Asylum seekers are part of the community and therefore protected by the Rights, Safeguards and Equality of Opportunity chapter of the Good Friday agreement. I understand that in ongoing court proceedings—I prefer “continuing” court proceedings—the Home Office has not disputed the argument that the protections of the relevant chapter of the Good Friday agreement extend to asylum seekers and refugees.

The Bill instructs the Secretary of State to declare inadmissible any claim that removal of an individual would breach their convention rights, if that individual met the extremely broad criteria covered by the duty to remove. It says that this inadmissibility cannot be appealed, so if those provisions were applied to someone arriving in Northern Ireland, it would be a direct breach of the Belfast/Good Friday agreement because it makes convention rights inaccessible and restricts that individual’s direct access to the courts and remedies for breach of the convention. Also, the application of the Bill to land border crossings could constitute a breach of Article 2 of the Windsor Framework and indeed of its very objectives.

To try to compress all that down, it is a matter of considerable concern that there is a failure to address compliance with Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, and more broadly with the Good Friday agreement, in the human rights memorandum to the Bill. I will end where I started, which is to ask the Minister whether such an assessment is going to materialise.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Debate between Lord Cashman and Baroness Ludford

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Thursday 3rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cashman (Lab)]

My Lords, I rise briefly to speak to these amendments and congratulate my noble friend Lady Lister of Burtersett on so eloquently moving the amendment. I also congratulate the other speakers who have spoken in favour.

I particularly welcome Amendment 61 of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, because, as he said, he introduces into it elements—human rights and the regard to the special provisions within the Equality Act —of which we should be proud and on which we should lead internationally. I give my wholehearted support to that because, as noble Lords have heard me say before—I make no apologies for saying it again and again—in each of these situations, I imagine what I would want as an asylum seeker or refugee. I must imagine myself in that situation. Some who read our newspapers would believe that it is a picnic and a party; it is certainly not at the moment in the United Kingdom. I believe that the signal that we are sending out with the Bill and with these amendments is that asylum seekers and those seeking refuge are not welcome.

To reiterate the points made by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, I remember that, when I was a Member of the European Parliament many years ago, I was approached by a person whose partner was a gay man from Belarus who was seeking asylum here. His asylum process was going through and, suddenly, in the very early hours of the morning, he was arrested and detained at a detention centre. Let us make no bones about it: Clause 12(9) introduces detention centres—they are called “accommodation” centres, but asylum seekers are detained and cannot leave them at will. This is why the minimum conditions that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Durham outlined are a basic and bare necessity to which we should adhere. This young gay man was placed in a detention centre for a number of weeks and had to sleep in shared accommodation; we managed to get him out because his partner could afford a rather brilliant lawyer to plead the case. While he was there, he contemplated suicide on an hourly basis. This young man is now in a senior job in the United Kingdom, paying his taxes, his dues and his national insurance and abiding by the same rules and laws as everyone else. But he still lives with that scar every single day, and I do not want any other person to experience that.

Placing vulnerable people back into these situations, as outlined by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, only increases stress and the damage to mental health. If LGBTQI people are put back into the communities from which they have fled, they face further oppression within places that should be safe, and it makes it much more difficult for them to prove their LGBTQI status to others.

Someone once said to me, “Oh, being trans is just a feeling, isn’t it?” Well, I cannot prove to anyone that I am a gay man; it is a feeling and one that I have when I look at another human being—although not every single man, interestingly enough. Therefore, we have to deal with these particular issues, not only of LGBTQI people but all of these vulnerable asylum seekers.

I will finish with this. In roughly 1600, Shakespeare co-wrote a play; it was the only play that he co-wrote and it is “Sir Thomas More”. Sir Thomas More is called to London because the citizens of London are rebelling—they had probably read the tabloids of the day—because “the strangers” had made their way from Calais via Dover to London. In a parenthesis to a speech, Thomas More comes out, and with one hand silences the crowd. In that silence, a voice shouts, “Remove them!” Thomas More replies: “You bid that they be removed, the stranger, with their children upon their back, their families at their side, their belongings at their feet. Imagine you are the stranger, with your children upon your back, your family at your side, your belongings at your feet. Imagine you are the stranger and bid that they be removed and show your mountanish inhumanity.” It is a great privilege and pleasure to support these amendments.

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I support all the amendments in this group and I ask the Minister to address in her response a couple of issues, particularly in relation to Amendments 57 and 61, about restricting the placing of vulnerable people in accommodation centres—military barracks. When a similar amendment to Amendment 57 was tabled in Committee in the other place, the Home Office Minister, Tom Pursglove, said it was

“unnecessary because there are no plans to place those with children in accommodation centres”.—[Official Report, Commons, Nationality and Borders Bill Committee, 21/10/21; col. 295.]

If the Home Office has no such plans, which is a welcome commitment, why will it not accept a statutory shield against placing at least children in those centres?

Wider than that, I am grateful to the British Red Cross, which has reminded us that there is a Home Office policy document, of which the latest update was in May 2021, called Allocation of Accommodation Policy. It has a section on “Asylum seekers considered unsuitable for Napier”, which starts with the statement:

“Women and dependent children are not suitable to be accommodated at Napier”,


before listing further cases, including potential survivors of modern slavery, people with a disability and those with complex health needs. The tablers of Amendment 57, which I support, say the list should be longer and should include those under Amendment 61. If the Home Office has these policy commitments, it is my contention that it ought to accept the amendments restricting the types of people who would be sent to these accommodation centres. I would be very pleased to hear the Minister agree and therefore accept at least Amendments 57 and 61.