I am grateful to the noble Lord. I think that is an argument on my side rather than on his, though, is it not? If more people who get to this country are given refugee status because of the claim they have made, surely that is an argument to say that we should look differently at groups 1 and 2, which would lessen their chances, if I have understood it correctly. At any rate, my proposition is that the majority of people reaching France claim asylum in France; only a minority seek to come here. It is surely the lack of safe and legal routes from France to this country that has given the traffickers a field day. The answer must be to have a better relationship with France and to do this on a more co-operative basis. Rather than simply criticising the French, I think we have to co-operate with them as the only way to move forward.
7.45 pm
I turn very briefly to other points. Paragraphs 345A and 345D of the Immigration Rules deal with admissibility provisions. My understanding is that this is about returning claimants to a safe third country if they came through that safe third country. We discussed this at length when we were discussing the then Nationality and Borders Bill. My question for the Minister is this: without accepting the basic proposition, if this is the Government’s policy, can he give us any idea of safe countries through which asylum seekers reach Britain and which have agreed that they should be returned? Have we an agreement with the French, the Germans, the Belgians or whoever else? I do not think we have. Clearly, the policy will be unworkable unless such an agreement has been reached.
It is my contention that these measures are in breach of the 1951 Geneva convention. The Government say that everything they are doing is in line with the 1951 Geneva convention, but it is a matter of whose view one accepts: the Government’s view or that of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. I would have thought that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is the guardian of the convention, rather than people who have an opinion which the Government should be able to ignore.
I refute the idea that one should not claim asylum in Britain if one has been through a safe third country. Most of the routes to safety go through other countries. We can fly Ukrainians in but they all come through Poland. The only people who can get here directly are probably people from Hong Kong, who can get on a plane that leaves Hong Kong and arrive at Heathrow. For the rest, it is very hard to see how asylum seekers can make a journey without going through a safe country. I suppose that is the basis for the distinction between group 1 refugees and those who were given a lesser right under the group 2 arrangements—which I think is a breach of the convention.
I will pick up one other point, which may or may not have been debated in the past. The replacement paragraph 339O states:
“The Secretary of State will not … grant of refugee status if in part of the country of origin a person would not have a well-founded fear of being persecuted, and the person can reasonably be expected to stay in that part of the country”,
even if there are difficulties in making that journey. I think what that means—and I am going back to Afghanistan before the Taliban took over—is that the Home Office for a time thought it was okay to return Afghans to Afghanistan because they were safe in some parts of the country. It is an incredibly difficult proposition to say to someone, “You fled for fear of persecution but in a little bit of your own country you would have been okay.” I am not sure that that stands up to a lot of scrutiny, and I am concerned that it could be misinterpreted. We saw what happened when the Taliban finally and tragically took over the whole of Afghanistan, where the Home Office policy would not have worked anyway, because people would have been under threat of persecution in all parts of the country.
I do not like the approach of these complicated Immigration Rules. I do not want to go through all the arguments we had on the Nationality and Borders Bill, because we spent a lot of time on that and some
of the points are simply restated in the Immigration Rules, but as a method of approach I find it incredibly difficult. It is hard to pick out the key issues from the less important ones. There is a mention of Rwanda in either the statement of changes or the Explanatory Memorandum which we talked about earlier this afternoon, and I think it is a policy of doubtful validity.
To paraphrase the noble Lord, Lord Horam, I think he said he did not like the way the lawyers got in on the act or judicial review and all that. Surely, it is one of the safeguards in a democracy that we have the rule of law and that lawyers can challenge government decisions. It may be a nuisance for Governments, but surely judicial review is one of the important safeguards. We as a country still believe in the rule of law; I hope we will go on doing so, whatever changes there are in government Ministers, Home Secretaries or whatever.