It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds). It was refreshing to hear somebody on the Conservative Benches talking up the merits of an asylum visa. That would break the model of the people-smuggling gangs because it would give people a safe and legal route and safety and certainty. Nobody need be exploited by paying over everything that they own to get into a leaky dinghy in the channel if they could come here for safety and sanctuary by travelling as any of us would travel.
I understand from others in the Committee that Conservative Members are quite keen to wind up the debate early tonight because they are going to a Burns supper. I am not sure whether that is true, but it is certainly a rumour that I heard earlier. It made me think of some of the things that Robert Burns—I am a big fan of our national bard—might have to say to the Conservative party about the way in which it conducts its business. Let me start with:
“Man’s inhumanity to man,
Makes countless thousands mourn.”
I commend to the Committee the amendments tabled in my name, as well as those tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North (Patrick Grady) and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Joanna Cherry). I will first address clause 3 on the disapplication of the Human Rights Act 1998. That Act was landmark legislation. It is woven into the fabric of our devolved institutions, and it underpins the Good Friday agreement. It should concern us all that a Government without any kind of mandate to do so start picking away the stitching. The Law Society said that the exclusion of the Human Rights Act to this extent is unprecedented.
Speaking of defending the rights of people to migrate, Robert Burns, who has a verse on just about everything, has one on the rights of highlanders against their lairds, who were not allowing them to migrate to Canada. He said:
“They! an’ be damned! what right hae they
To meat or sleep or light o’ day,
Far less to riches, pow’r or freedom,
But what your lordships please to gie them?”
We should give asylum seekers far more than this Government think they have a right to gie them.
Disapplying section 6 removes the obligation for courts and immigration officials to take into account human rights when assessing the safety of Rwanda. Disapplying section 3 limits the protections that courts can provide. Disapplying section 2 forces courts to ignore any European Court of Human Rights rulings of Rwanda as unsafe. Those are important protections: not only do they ensure people’s safety from Government, but they act as a check specifically on the Home Office—a Home Office that we know has long and consistent form in making serious mistakes with long-lasting and life-changing consequences. One need only reflect on the legacy of Windrush, TOEIC—the test of English for international communication—and the highly skilled migrant scandal to know the scale of Home Office incompetence. We need the courts to offer protection against the Home Office’s instinct to deport first and ask questions later.
Amendments 11 to 18 in the name of the right hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) make an already unjustifiable situation much, much worse. Liberty has stated that they effectively remove the possibility of securing any remedy—much less an effective one—for the breach or threatened breach of rights arising from removals to Rwanda on the basis that it is an unsafe country. Robert Burns said in his “Slave’s Lament”:
Torn from that lovely shore, and must never see it more;
And alas! I am weary, weary O.”
I think we all feel that weariness about the circularity of the Government’s ridiculous arguments. It is unsafe for the refugees who get to come here from Rwanda, but somehow, it is safe enough for us to send people to Rwanda. It makes absolutely no sense.
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This Government’s moving of people to Rwanda against their will is nothing but state-sponsored people trafficking. This Government are now in effect a criminal gang, moving people across the world. People moved against their will, with no regard to their safety and no recourse to appeal, to a country they do not know, involving money and profit—that sounds like people smuggling to me. Conservative Members either cannot see that, or frankly just do not care, because to them, these are not really people who we are talking about. They never have to see them; they never have to engage with them; they never have them crying across the desk in front of them at a community hall on a Friday. It is utterly despicable.
I turn now to clause 5, which deals with interim measures of the European Court of Human Rights. Interim measures are important and, according to the Court’s well-established practice, apply only where there is an
“imminent risk of irreparable harm”.
Clause 5 expands on the previous provisions of the Illegal Migration Act to ignore interim measures. The provisions that we passed under the Illegal Migration Act are not even in force yet—as I mentioned yesterday, it is only 181 days since that Act got Royal Assent, but here we are this afternoon, legislating yet again. Interim measures exist not just in international law, but in our own domestic law. As my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West said, they often happen late at night. That is the nature of these things: they are last-minute protections for people who have no other recourse or remedy. They are not unusual, but refusing to comply with them—as the Bill sets out, and as the right hon. Member for Newark’s amendments demand—would be a clear and serious breach of international law. No mere technicality here: it would be a serious breach of international law.
Where does that leave us with the Government of Rwanda, whose Minister has been quite clear on the need for this agreement to be compliant with international law? Today, the Rwandan President Paul Kagame said to The Guardian that
“There are limits for how long this can drag on”,
and that he would be happy for the scheme to be scrapped entirely. The Government are on very shaky ground here. Are the Minister and the right hon. Member for Newark really going to have us believe that we can cross our fingers behind our back and nobody will know that the UK Government broke international law? They are having us on.
What is particularly daft about clause 5 is that the European Court of Human Rights has already responded to the concerns that UK Ministers have raised. In November last year, the Court provisionally adopted amendments to rule 39 of its rules of court on the procedure for interim measures, tightening up the circumstances and the procedures. The Court is also changing the procedure that Member after Member howled about earlier on, so that judges are no longer
anonymous. I do not know whether, as a result of the amendments Conservative Members have tabled, those judges will be forced to disclose their preferred nightwear—perhaps that is a matter of discretion. The grievance that the right hon. Member for Newark, and the UK Government and their Back Benchers, howl about is being addressed, which makes this Bill even more of a waste of everybody’s time, money and energy. What damage does it do when the UK Government continue to behave like a petulant child, rather than engage constructively with the international organisation of which they are a part? They send a judge to the Court—they are part of this process. It is not somebody else’s Court: it is our Court. We are part of it.
Furthermore, placing all decisions on compliance with an interim measure in the hands of a Minister is a deeply worrying suggestion—a Minister is far less appropriate than a court. Maybe that Minister will also be in their pyjamas as they sign off a batch of human cargo in the dead of night, but since that will presumably be a British Minister in Union Jack pyjamas rather than a European judge in a blue onesie with yellow stars, Conservative Members will probably think that is perfectly acceptable. They care more about flags than about rights, and they have the cheek to call us nationalists. Deliberately breaching international law is no longer something we need assume a Minister of this particular Government would in any way hesitate to do. The Law Society of Scotland has added to the criticism of that power, saying that it contradicts the doctrine of the separation of powers between the Executive and the judiciary. As the right hon. and learned Member for Kenilworth and Southam (Sir Jeremy Wright) pointed out, such a move would have serious foreign policy implications.
I support the amendment tabled by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), and while I appreciate its intention, it is hard not to feel that the amendment in the name of the official Opposition is merely an attempt to water the clause down by having a Minister consult with their Attorney General. Given that the right hon. and learned Member for Fareham (Suella Braverman) was the Attorney General before being Home Secretary and then signing the amendments tabled today that undermine human rights, I am not sure that is the protection that the official Opposition think it is. I note the various amendments and the efforts of the right hon. and learned Member for South Swindon (Sir Robert Buckland) and his colleagues to amend this Bill, but I think we all know that they are on a hiding to nothing.
Moving on to clause 8, the extent clause, the SNP has been very clear—very clear indeed—that we do not believe in this cruel and unnecessary Bill. We do not support it, and our attempt to decisively declare that this is not in Scotland’s name comes in the form of amendments 4, 5 and 32 to 34, in the names of my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow North and my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West. They attempt to remove Scotland from the territorial extent of the Bill and to require the legislative consent of the Scottish Parliament. As my hon. and learned Friend pointed out earlier, this has a significant impact on the ability of Scottish courts and our legal system to work effectively. We have asked for the legislative consent of the Scottish Parliament before this legislation comes
into force. It is gey chilly in Scotland today, but I can say to the Minister that hell would freeze over before he obtained our legislative consent to this Bill.
Moving to clause 9, on commencement, amendment 41 seeks to separate the treaty from this Bill and ensure that the treaty itself receives the scrutiny it deserves, given the significance of the provisions made in that treaty. I do not know how many colleagues have examined the treaty, but I think it is quite right and quite appropriate that this House should do so in a debate, as the Home Affairs Committee has asked.
Lastly, because of the way that this strange process is laid out, I move to clause 1. It comes last—of course it does—in this topsy-turvy world of Westminster. The principle of the Bill remains abhorrent to us. International law is not something that states should disregard when it inconveniences them. Again, Burns has an important principle. In his letter to Mrs Frances Anna Dunlop, he says:
“Whatever mitigates the woes or increases the happiness of others, this is my criterion for goodness; and whatever injures society at large, or any individual in it, this is my measure of iniquity.”
This Bill is riddled with iniquity and harm. We rightly call out states that abuse human rights, ignore their courts and treat people in a dehumanising manner, and there is absolutely no justification for the UK doing so. It is merely a bogeyman to distract the public from the chaos that the Conservatives have presided over all these years. Our amendments 39, 40 and 42 to 44 seek to assert the importance of complying with our international obligations to abide by the Human Rights Act. It is astonishing—astonishing—that we are required to do so, but as the Bill’s preface sets out, the Bill is very much incompatible with convention rights, and this Tory Government wish to have us carry on regardless.
The Right Rev. Sally Foster-Fulton, the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, has been among many voices calling out this appalling legislation. She says:
“This bill threatens to destroy that”—
the UK’s—
“reputation, reducing our ability to speak with any credibility on injustices and human rights abuses across the world. It also sets a worrying precedent that fundamental human rights can be eroded and denied to some.”
Far be it from me to rush to the defence of the UK’s international reputation, but I urge Members to consider the wider implications of this cruel policy. It is not domestic; it is international, and it has wide-reaching implications. Scotland wants no part of this failed, expensive and cruel Rwanda plan. We look forward instead to the day that we are no longer beholden to this insular and damaging UK immigration policy, and to this Parliament that does not speak in our name. We want Scotland to take her place in the world with all of the responsibilities that that entails in the international community. To finish, again, with Burns:
“For a’ that, an’ a’ that,
It’s comin yet for a’ that,
That man to man the world o’er,
Shall brothers be for a’ that.”