Asylum: UK-Rwanda Agreement

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 22nd January 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, the UK-Rwanda Agreement on an Asylum Partnership, which the House is debating today, will not, I suspect, rank high in the ratings of Britain’s diplomatic history. Why not? Because it is costly, with so far no evident benefit, and because it transgresses a whole range of our international commitments and obligations, including those in the refugee convention, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the convention against torture and, potentially, the European Convention on Human Rights.

You cannot hope to be a credible champion of the rules-based international order—as the Government, rightly in my view, aspire to be—and, at the same time, pick and choose which of those rules you yourself will continue to honour. It upends our constitutional order separating the powers of the legislature, the Executive and the judiciary, by setting aside the Supreme Court’s ruling that Rwanda is not a safe country to which to send refugees—and that when, as other speakers have said, it is reported that we have been admitting some Rwandan asylum seekers, presumably on the grounds that Rwanda is not a safe country for them.

Fortunately, we have at our disposal the excellent, concise and relevant report on the Rwanda agreement by this House’s International Agreements Committee—in spite of the absurdly short time limit laid by the Government for the committee to do its work, which has inhibited its ability to gather evidence and to consider the Government’s own tardy replies to its inquiries. Can the Minister tell us whether there is any other properly democratic country that provides as little time and as little scope for its apparently sovereign legislature to consider international treaties and agreements before they are ratified? The noble Lord, Lord Howell, made that point, and I strongly endorse it. If there is no such country that has as short a timescale, with as little scope, as we do, surely it is essential that the Government provide more time and scope in future?

The problems with this agreement do not stop there. I differ from the suggestion from a noble Lord who spoke previously that those who support the second Motion are putting the cart before the horse; I suggest that today’s debate puts the cart quite firmly and squarely before the horse. This is the last pre-ratification parliamentary process on this agreement. Once it is over, there is nothing to stop the Government ratifying the next day, if that is what they decide to do.

Yet the obligations on both sides, which are set out in the agreement, require primary legislation—which is not yet complete. In the case of Rwanda, I gather that it has not yet even begun. For Rwanda, it requires putting in hand and carrying out a whole range of remedial training and institutional changes needed if the problems identified by our own Supreme Court, which declared Rwanda an unsafe country to which to send asylum seekers, are to be remedied.

These are extremely serious lacunas, without the filling of which there can be no certainty that Rwanda has indeed become a safe place to which asylum seekers can be sent. Indeed, until the Government are sure that these lacunas have been remedied, it must surely be doubtful whether it is even legal for our authorities to compel asylum seekers, however they may have arrived here, to go to Rwanda. Perhaps the Minister could comment on that point.

The committee’s report sets out 10 steps which it believes will need to have been completed before the problems identified by the Supreme Court are remedied. Could the Minister be so kind as to tell the House whether the Government concur with that analysis and list? If so, what plan and timetable exist for them to be implemented? Do the Government accept that that process needs to have been, in the committee’s words,

“put in place and bedded in”

before any process of ratification is completed?

The answers that the Minister gives to those questions will clearly affect the conclusion to be reached by this House at the end of the debate. In the committee’s view, which I find compelling, there would then need to be a further debate before the UK proceeds to ratification. That must surely be the right way to proceed in the present circumstances and will, I hope, be the conclusion we reach today. If not, it will make a mockery of the sovereignty of Parliament, which the Government frequently call on us and the courts to recognise and respect.