My Lords, I will also speak to related amendments that I have tabled: Amendments 24, 26, 28 and 30. I am extremely grateful to those who have co-signed all or some of those amendments: the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, and the noble Baroness, Lady Brinton.
I will speak very briefly, because I spoke previously about this both on Second Reading and in Committee. The current version of Clause 4(1) enables an applicant to oppose removal to Rwanda on the grounds that it is not a safe country for the applicant, but only if the applicant provides
“compelling evidence relating specifically to the person’s particular individual circumstances”.
Similarly, Clause 4(4), on the ability to obtain interim relief from removal to Rwanda, depends on particular individual circumstances relating to the applicant in question.
The defect in those provisions—a very basic defect—is that no provision is currently made for applicants in one of the important categories of refugee defined in Article 1A(2) of the 1951 refugee convention. That category comprises applicants who have a well-founded fear of persecution because of their
“membership of a particular social group”.
You can immediately see the difference between other categories of refugee under the convention, who are individual persons, and this category—which is probably the largest, or certainly the most important—comprising a large number of people who qualify as refugees because they are members of a particular social group. Yet when we look at Clause 4—I mentioned subsection (1) as well as subsection (4) on interim relief—there is no reference whatever to “group”, so one category of refugee has simply dropped off the list completely.
The proper approach of courts and tribunals to such a refugee was described in detail by the Supreme Court in HJ (Iran) and HT (Cameroon) v Secretary of State for the Home Department, a 2010 decision, especially in the judgment of Lord Rodger of Earlsferry. I will not take the House through the case in detail. It is sufficient for me to say briefly that the approach to be taken, as established by that case, is that, if the applicant for asylum claims to be a member of a particular social group, the other members of which have a well-founded fear of persecution, the applicant is entitled to be considered a refugee provided that they satisfy the particular decision-maker that they are a member of that social group.
HJ (Iran) and the other case I mentioned concerned men who wanted to live an openly gay life and would have faced persecution in their home country had they done so, but the principle that I just described of the way to treat this category of refugee, as set out in HJ (Iran), applies across the board. It is not limited to people who are LGBT but applies to those who are members of a particular social group because of their ethnicity or gender or who hold a particular religious or political belief. For example, by way of analogy with the LGBT men who applied in HJ (Iran), if people hold particular philosophical, political or religious views that they have not expressed because of a real risk of persecution, but would like to do so and to live
a life in which they can express those views, they are to be treated as members of a social group and granted the status of a refugee accordingly.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said in Committee, the Bill presents us with a false dichotomy. On the one hand, it is all about me—the claimant, the individual; on the other hand, it is about Rwanda generally. The former, the Bill says in Clause 4, allows you to make a claim for interim relief or removal generally to Rwanda, but the latter does not. In between those two extremes is the category of a member of a social group with a well-founded fear of persecution. This is not a torpedo point; it is not intended to undermine or delay this legislation. It is a reflection of the omission of a basic category of refugee defined in the convention, and an extremely important category as well. On that basis, I beg to move.