Rwanda: Memorandum of Understanding

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 6th February 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, is to be congratulated on bringing this aspect of the Rwanda agreement to the House for debate. It is one of the many contentious aspects of that agreement, and it is impossible to avoid the suspicion that the main driver of the choice of an MoU rather than a treaty is that it escapes full parliamentary scrutiny, let alone approval by Parliament.

Avoiding full parliamentary scrutiny has also made it more difficult to elicit from the Government a clear answer to the question of whether the agreement is consistent with our treaty obligations to asylum seekers under the 1951 refugee convention, to which we are a party. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, whose job is to ensure that parties to the convention respect its provisions, says that it is not.

The Minister wrote to me on 3 February setting out the reasoning behind his curt and cursory reply to my question on 24 January. That is welcome, but it is not convincing. The hard fact is that there is no provision in Article 31 of the convention or elsewhere in it authorising a party to refuse even to consider an asylum application before deporting the applicant. It is bizarre that in that letter the Government still referred wistfully to the Dublin convention, when it was their act of “getting Brexit done” that resulted in its loss.

All this may sound rather arcane, but it matters. The Government’s clearly proclaimed policy is to uphold the rules-based international order, but we are now, by unilateral assertion, deciding to act in breach of one of those rules. What is to stop others doing likewise? What would then remain of the rules-based international order? There are reports that the Government may be contemplating doubling down by introducing legislation to deport to Rwanda even potentially genuine asylum seekers—for example, Afghans fleeing the Taliban or Iranian women fleeing persecution—without any chance of consideration. Frankly, that is an appalling road to go down and I hope that the Minister will say that the Government will not go down it.