UK Borders Bill

moved Amendment No. 52: 52: Clause 31, page 16, line 16, leave out ““12 months”” and insert ““two years”” The noble Lord said: Clause 31 provides for the deportation of a foreign criminal. In the debates on Section 72 of the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002, the expression, "““presumed to have been convicted by a final judgment of a particularly serious crime””," was defined for the purpose of excluding a person who came within the definition of a ““Serious criminal”” in the section heading. He was excluded from the protection of the refugee convention in accordance with Article 33. Although the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, proposed an amendment raising the threshold to 14 years, the House decided that two years was right. It would be useful to know how many such persons have been denied the right to appeal for asylum since February 2003 when this section came into force. Those persons have been liable to immediate deportation at the end of their sentences for more than four years, and presumably all of them will have been subject to deportation orders and will have been prohibited from appealing against the orders if the AIT agreed that the certificate issued by the Secretary of State properly claimed that the individual had been convicted of a particularly serious crime, as defined in Section 72(2) to (4) of the Act. Section 72(4) also excludes from the protection of the refugee convention a person convicted of any one of 324 offences specified by the Secretary of State, irrespective of the sentence that has been imposed on that person, and even if the sentence is suspended. I should be grateful if the noble Lord would confirm that that is a fact. That provision is mirrored by Clause 31(3), so that a person who commits an offence in that list is both a ““foreign criminal”” and a ““serious criminal””, but a person who commits some other offence only comes within both categories if he is sentenced to at least two years. If he is sentenced to less than 12 months, he is neither a foreign criminal nor a serious criminal. But if he is sentenced to at least 12 months but less than two years, he is a foreign criminal but not a serious criminal. This amendment aligns the definitions with one another. Of course, it does not prevent the Secretary of State making a deportation order against the person who is sentenced to between one and two years, but it gives him the discretion not to do so when the person qualifies for the protection of Article 33, even within the narrow compass of Section 72 of the 2002 Act. We should note that in Clause 116 of the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, still to be considered by Parliament, there is yet another category of person labelled as a ““foreign criminal””, but not identical with the ““foreign criminal”” defined in Clause 31.The definition is almost, but not quite, the same as that in Section 72 of the NIA Act 2002: "““A person … presumed to have been convicted by a final judgment of a particularly serious crime””—" called, as I said, a ““Serious criminal”” in the section heading. The two variations in Clause 116 of the new Bill are that the person convicted of an offence specified by the Secretary of State must have been sentenced to a period of imprisonment, which presumably may be a suspended sentence, and an additional condition that Article 1F of the refugee convention, which excludes certain criminals from the protection of the convention, applies to him. If these variations are read back into Section 72 of the NIA Act and the term ““foreign criminal”” was then defined as a person coming within any of the resulting conditions common to the two measures, we could replace the term ““foreign criminal”” in Clause 31 with another expression such as ““deportable criminal””. I respectfully suggest that otherwise there is going to be some confusion between these three pieces of legislation. I beg to move.