I am conscious of what you said about time, Mr Deputy Speaker, and I should like to make some progress.
In Lords amendment 4, Lord Anderson of Ipswich proposes to add to the words
“Every decision-maker must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country”
the words
“unless presented with credible evidence to the contrary”.
I agree that evidence is important. If judges and other decision makers are not allowed to make decisions on the basis of evidence, rather than relying on a bit of legislation drawn up in a short period, the Government have zero credibility. They are asking people to blindfold themselves to any other circumstances, and not to heed any evidence or proof. There must be an opportunity for every decision maker to treat the evidence with the due diligence that we would all expect.
Lords amendment 5 would remove the parts of the Bill that state that Rwanda should automatically be considered a safe country; it provides a rebuttal mechanism for the assertion of safety in Rwanda. Liberty says that the amendment corrects
“a deficiency in the Bill whereby Parliament is asked to state that Rwanda is and will continue to be safe, and there is no mechanism by which this can be revisited. This is a moderate safeguard”.
If the Government thought about this fully, they would surely conclude that the amendment would enhance the Bill; but they are, of course, rejecting all amendments, regardless of their source.
Lords amendment 6 effectively restores the power of the courts to make a factual judgment on the safety of Rwanda in an individual case, or for a group of people who share characteristics, such as LGBTQ people. I think it telling that the Minister said that it completely undermined the purpose of the Bill. “Well, good,” is all I can say in response. We should be trying to undermine the purpose of the Bill if its aim is, for example, to ship LGBTQ people off to a country that may not welcome them in all circumstances, without allowing them to check the position first. I think it perfectly reasonable to provide the ability to make judgments of this kind. I recall that at the back of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 was a list
of countries with exemptions for particular groups of people—in some cases specifying men or women—but the Bill does not even do that. I think it entirely reasonable for there to be some way of questioning this power in the Bill.
Lords amendment 7, tabled by Baroness Lister, concerns issues related to the age of unaccompanied children, which I consider to be of the utmost importance. The treaty makes provision for what happens if a child somehow mysteriously ends up in Rwanda by mistake, but that only happens if the Home Office has made an error of some kind in sending the child there in the first place. We know from medical professionals that some of the age assessments are effectively pseudo-science. We know that when children have come here, having crossed seas, continents and war zones in very difficult circumstances, it may be more difficult to assess their age, because they have had a much tougher paper round than my son, for example. We also know that not all children look exactly the same or present themselves in exactly the same way, although they may be the same age. We can all remember that when we were at school, there was always some great big guy with a beard and a hairy chest when the others were knee-high to a buttercup.