Of course it is a given that the law changes, and laws change via a variety of different means, including how this place votes. Nevertheless, the UK would be seen to be choosing—in order to tackle a problem in an ineffective way—to disapply the Human Rights Act 1998 and at least to an extent not to comply with international law.
I heard all the disparaging remarks about lefty lawyers, activists, judges, foreign judges and so on, all of which demeans this place and is not what people who are supposed to uphold the constitution ought to be saying, particularly given that the majority of lawyers I have heard speaking in this debate are on the Conservative Benches; if Conservative Members want to describe themselves as lefty lawyers, that is their business, but it is not helpful. But when we have the Law Society saying that the Bill might be incompatible with our international obligations and
“sets a dangerous legal and constitutional precedent by legislating to overturn an evidence-based finding of fact by the UK’s highest court”,
we should take it seriously.
There is no doubt whatever that for us to decide to pass a law to say that Rwanda is a safe country is an overreach of Parliament, because if we have evidence to say that Rwanda is safe, present it to the court—do it in the proper way. It is dangerously authoritarian to decide on a matter of fact of law rather than presenting it before the courts. It is not only an overreach, however; it is also ridiculous. If we are going to declare Rwanda safe just because we want it to be, I declare Blackburn Rovers back in the Premier League and Alan Shearer to be 30 years younger and back in a No. 9 shirt playing up front for us—there we are, make it so—but that is clearly not the case, sadly. If there is evidence, we should present it to the court. It is ridiculous for this place to say that somehow it can declare a place safe just because it is convenient for it to do so.
We do not control migration by this kind of sophistry, but deterrence is still appropriate. People have asked what deterrence we are going to have: the deterrent is if we had a functioning asylum system where we actually returned people whose applications failed.