Oral Answers to Questions

Nadia Whittome Excerpts

Monday 21st October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Diana Johnson]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for raising that point. Those conversations are ongoing; later this month, conversations will take place on what more can be done to ensure that the manufacturers take their responsibility seriously and do everything they can to stop the trade in parts, which is a particular issue with mobile phones.

[Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) (Lab)]

12. If she will make an assessment of the potential merits of removing Georgia from her Department’s list of safe countries for removals, in the context of the recent passage of legislation on LGBT rights in that country.

[The Minister for Border Security and Asylum (Dame Angela Eagle)]

Mr Speaker, I suspect I might be coughing almost as much as you, but for a completely different reason.

We constantly update our assessment of LGBT rights and other factors affecting the safety of different countries, working closely with the Foreign Office and informed by regular independent reports from the chief inspector of borders and immigration. The latest update for Georgia was published last month and is available on the gov.uk website.

[Nadia Whittome]

The safe state designation that the previous Government introduced was intended to allow Georgian and Indian nationals to be returned without any individualised assessment of the safety of the country for each person. In both countries, persecution of certain minorities is on the rise; that makes their inclusion on the list particularly wrong, but also highlights the wider dangers of blanket inadmissibility of asylum claims based on nationality. What steps will the Government take to ensure that individuals’ asylum claims are always properly assessed?

[Dame Angela Eagle]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising this important issue and bringing her concerns—concerns that I share—to the attention of the House. We regularly monitor and review the situation in countries of origin, working closely with the Foreign Office, and our resulting country policy and information notes are published on the gov.uk website. Should we assess that the troubling new law to which my hon. Friend refers, or any other changes, fundamentally affect the justification for Georgia’s designation, we will seek to remove it from the list, using the correct parliamentary process.