UK Parliament / Open data

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

I strongly agree with the point that the noble Baroness has made. My name is to Amendments 57 and 59. It is rather appropriate that we come to these amendments immediately after the House has considered the murder of Navalny.

There is a precedent for what we are asked to do in Clauses 5(2) and 5(3)—a Russian precedent. In 2016, the Russian Parliament passed a decree enabling the Russian Constitutional Court to ignore rulings from the European Court of Human Rights. It is not a very exact precedent; the Russian Parliament was passing permissive legislation, which permitted the Constitutional Court in Moscow to ignore rulings from Strasbourg.

What we are doing is not permissive but proscriptive and prohibitive. We are being asked to ban all our courts from having regard to or paying any attention to any interim measure from Strasbourg if it relates to a decision on transportation to Rwanda. We are being asked to pass a law which bans any official from paying any attention to a Strasbourg ruling in a relevant case; only a Minister is allowed to decide whether we comply or not. There is no role for Parliament or the courts, and the role of the Executive is strictly at ministerial level. That is extraordinary.

Russia is no longer in the Council of Europe. It lost some of its rights with the second Chechen war and more with the seizure of Crimea, and after the invasion of Ukraine it lost them all. However, we seem to think that we can stay even though the law we are being asked to pass is much more draconian, trenchant, in the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and hostile to the convention than the Kremlin’s. It is a very strange fact that at this moment—

Type
Proceeding contribution
Reference
836 c459 
Session
2023-24
Chamber / Committee
House of Lords chamber
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