Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Dubs Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 5th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, I have had the privilege of serving on the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which has produced some interesting and critical comments about the Bill. I have also had a close association with the Refugee Council, Safe Passage and a number of other NGOs working with refugees. Having visited some refugee camps, whether in the Calais area or on the Greek islands, I have been impressed by the quality and determination of the volunteers, mainly from this country, who have gone to work with refugees and are dedicated to helping the most vulnerable of their fellow human beings.

We should be judged as a country by how we handle this issue, and I fear that we will come out of this badly in the eyes of other countries that have always thought that we take the lead in human rights and respect for the rule of law. If there is one sentence that sums up my criticism of the Bill, it is this. If there are no legal routes to safety, the traffickers have a field day. We are giving the traffickers far too much of an opportunity. That is what the traffickers want. How do they get their business except by there being no legal routes to safety?

We were all shocked and dismayed by the tragic drowning of people in the channel, not least the 27 people just recently. Our relations with France have to improve. We cannot deal with the issue of traffickers working in northern France unless we establish a good relationship with France as a country. It seems to me that shouting at the French and blaming them is not going to get us any further.

People say to me, “Why don’t these people claim asylum in France?” Of course, the majority do. Three times as many asylum seekers who get to France claim asylum there as seek to come to this country, and in the year up to 2021 the UK had the fifth highest number of refugees, but we were 17th in terms of per head of the population, so we are way behind. We are not doing as much as other countries, and in fact the French figures have been three times our figure. I agreed with the Minister in his opening speech when he said that we cannot take them all. Of course, we cannot. All I argue is that we should take our share of responsibility, along with other countries. It is a very modest request, and if it is put to the people of this country, they say they agree. I agree with what the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said about Clause 9, most of which I hope we will get rid of in Committee.

On the nub of my concerns, the comments made by my noble friends Lord Rosser and Lord Blunkett in particular, and others, sum up the criticism I have of the Bill. Surely we cannot be in breach of international conventions and just say blithely, “Well, it doesn’t matter what UNHCR thinks or what the 1951 Convention thinks. It doesn’t matter that we have no right to penalise people by the method of travel”. We cannot say that it does not matter: we believe in the rule of law and in international conventions. Also, we cannot keep saying that people should claim asylum in the first safe country they reach. That is not the 1951 Convention, no matter how much the Government insist that it is. Just in a practical sense, if that were to be applied, the 1 million Syrians who got to Germany would have all stayed in Greece, Italy and Malta. Surely that is not a sensible policy. That is a point I would make very strongly.

I regard UNHCR as the custodians of the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees. We should not blithely say, “Oh, they don’t know what they’re talking about”, which is effectively what the Government have been saying. We cannot therefore make it a criminal offence to arrive in the UK seeking asylum without having valid entry clearance. The Government keep saying “Oh, well, we can remove people”. There is not a single removal agreement with any EU country and, having left the EU, there is no sign we are going to achieve one. How are the Government going to remove people to whatever country they arrived from, particularly as that would not be the first safe country either?

As regards offshoring, what did the Government think they were doing letting it be known that Albania was on the list? It was complete nonsense. If the Government did not leak that, the Albanians got it from somewhere and they hotly denied it.

There must be a better way forward. We have fundamentally to support the right to family reunion, particularly of children coming to join their relatives—as we used to under the Dublin treaty, which the Government took out in the 2019 legislation. We should also find some accommodation for child refugees who have reached Europe who may not have family here. We must base what we do on international co-operation. We cannot do it on our own; we must achieve agreement. We must stop ministerial hostility to incomers, to new people arriving here. That poisons the atmosphere and makes sensible debate very difficult.

Finally, I am dismayed that our humanitarian tradition will be further undermined by this wretched Bill, unless we amend the nasty and objectionable features of it.