My Lords, I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, and put on record how impressed I have been with all the other speeches so far in support of the amendment. I will focus my remarks on looking in a little more detail at the court case that the noble Lord briefly mentioned.
On 18 January, the Upper Tribunal ruled that three unaccompanied minors and a vulnerable young man with mental health problems from the camp in Calais had a bona fide case to be allowed to join relatives already resident in the UK. This case is important because it follows a legal challenge co-ordinated by Citizens UK, which cited a little-known provision in the Dublin III regulations that allows an asylum seeker to join their relative in Britain if they have already applied for asylum in France. The Upper Tribunal ruled that the Home Office should immediately allow the three children and one adult to join their families.
Although the Government had argued until then that, under Dublin III, applications for asylum must be made and processed in France, the court accepted that the reality is very different and that the French system is, indeed, broken. Applications from asylum seekers with family already resident in the UK are not being processed and passed on to the UK. In effect, the safe and legal route has been denied to asylum seekers who have done all that has been asked of them.
In this ground-breaking ruling, the court accepted that evidence of a written claim to asylum in France was sufficient to prove that the children had initially sought safety there. Therefore, the court subsequently ruled that, instead of waiting for the French Government to ask, the British Government must act. It will now be up to Britain to examine the claims of these specific cases under the Dublin regulations. This changes the nature of the debate: the Government can no longer hide behind what can be described only as a broken system. Or can they? Will the Minister confirm whether the Government are planning to, or have already, appealed this decision? If so, why?
With the release of the dreadful figures from Europol citing 10,000 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children having gone missing, probably into the hands of human traffickers, surely the Government should now capitulate and accept the moral and legal case for accepting the relatively small number of the 3,000 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children into Britain that we, the Liberal Democrats, other politicians of a variety of different parties and numerous NGOs have been asking for. Citizens UK has identified several hundred children in Calais and Dunkirk alone who have a bone fide case for being brought to Britain. I saw some of them when I was in Dunkirk this Sunday, just as Storm Imogen was gathering pace. There is little justification for leaving anyone to suffer those conditions, let alone the young people who have every legal right to come to Britain. Surely the time has come to get on with it. The unaccompanied children we are talking about have relatives already resident in Britain, so there would be no burden on any of the local authorities.