I congratulate the hon. Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Pamela Nash) on securing this debate, and thank her for supporting me when I had a debate on this subject. I further congratulate her on securing a slot that means we can actually debate this matter properly. I am not sure whether you had something to do with that arrangement, Mr Speaker, but I know that you are the president of the Kaleidoscope Trust, an organisation set up to support activists in countries in which LGBT rights are oppressed. I have the privilege of being the chairman of the parliamentary friends of the Kaleidoscope Trust.
I salute our two parliamentary colleagues in Uganda, whom the hon. Lady knows, who have been brave enough to speak out against the Anti-Homosexuality Act. That has been a pretty tough call for them, and it is brave of them to take that position against the overwhelming popular and parliamentary attitude. We should register our support for them and for the position they have taken.
I want to pick up on a couple of the issues that the hon. Lady has raised. I welcome the review that the Home Secretary is now undertaking of our handling of cases in which people have claimed asylum following discrimination on the ground of their homosexuality. That review is long overdue. The commitment to give refuge to LGBT people seeking asylum from oppression in their own country was in my party’s manifesto, as well as in that of the Liberal Democrats. Given that both parts of the coalition supported it, it should have been in the programme for government. It is also the
stated position of the United Nations, and there has now been a Supreme Court ruling that people should be able to expect to live their lives as they are. Those are therefore the standards that people expect when they claim asylum and freedom from persecution. The disgraceful stories of how the UK Border Agency has handled some of these cases in the past few years are now, happily, a matter of public record and have caused the Home Secretary to take this extremely welcome action.
I put it to the Minister of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office, my right hon. Friend the Member for East Devon (Mr Swire), that our failure and the wider failure of the global community to prevent this legislation from getting on to the statute book in Uganda will cause a wave of people who are desperate to escape persecution to come here, and that we have a duty to give them refuge, as we have done in the past for people who have been persecuted in other ways. That such people will come to the United Kingdom and other parts of the world to escape persecution will in part be a consequence of our failure as a global community to prevent this legislation from being passed, and of our failure to assist countries that already have such legislation to get rid of it or not to enforce it, as happens in much of the world.