Thank you, Dame Rosie. In fact I have two amendments—amendments 54 and 55—on which I wish to focus my remarks. We all understand that the purpose of the Bill is to allow this Parliament to designate Rwanda as a safe country so that people can be removed to it lawfully. In order to achieve that, of course, we require a definition of what a safe country is. The Bill does that in clause 1(5)(a), which describes a safe country as
“a country to which persons may be removed from the United Kingdom”.
So far, so good. It seems to me that that is an essential part of the Bill’s inherent purpose.
The part of that subsection (a) that concerns me, and on which my amendment is focused, is where it says that that is
“in compliance with all of the United Kingdom’s obligations under international law that are relevant to the treatment in that country of persons who are removed there”.
In other words, the Bill seems to say that the United Kingdom, by saying that Rwanda is a safe country, can also deem itself to be in compliance with a set of its international law responsibilities. I do not think that can be correct.
1.45 pm
Few in this House are as familiar as I am with the vagaries and complexities of international law. If international law means anything, surely it must mean that it does not lie in the hands of any individual nation state—even this one—to determine its own compliance with it. Were it otherwise, international law would not really be international, and it would certainly serve no purpose in containing bad behaviour, as we sometimes ask it to do.