It is a delight to follow the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Sir Robert Neill), who made one of the best speeches so far today against the Bill. Unfortunately, he does not follow through on his logic, but I am sure that by the end of this process he will do, because he knows perfectly well that the Bill is not really acceptable. I am sure that in his heart of hearts he would like to vote against it tonight.
There are five reasons to vote against the Bill. The first is that it will not work; the idea that someone who is not deterred by a dangerous journey in a dinghy across the most crowded sea lane in the world will be deterred by this flimsy piece of nonsense is just laughable. Secondly, the Bill will lead to protracted and expensive chaos, because, as the hon. Gentleman says, it sails so close to the wind legally that it will inevitably lead to legal challenges. Ironically, since the ouster clauses mean that challenges cannot be adjudicated in the British courts, they will go to the European Court of Human Rights. So the Government are actually replacing a UK court with a European court here, and simultaneously declaring in the Bill that they are not satisfied that the Bill will withstand a legal challenge based on compatibility with the European convention on human rights. That is a recipe for chaos and for expense.
Thirdly, the Bill seeks to reverse by statute law a finding of fact by the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, and it therefore creates a legal fiction. Its title, the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill, gives the game away. According to the Bill, “Rwanda is safe, even if it isn’t safe, simply because the Government, through the Bill, say it’s safe.” Declaring that somewhere is safe does not make it, of itself, safe. We can no more change reality by law or legal diktat than we can by mere imagination. As Bolingbroke says in Richard II, we cannot
“cloy the hungry edge of appetite
By bare imagination of a feast”.
We cannot make Rwanda safe just by saying it, so the declaration in clause 2 that
“Every decision-maker must conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country”
is utterly fatuous. If Rwanda is, either now or in the future, in fact safe, the provision deeming it safe is, or will at that point be, otiose or redundant. But if Rwanda is not now or in the future safe, that provision is self-evidently wrong in fact and therefore wrong in principle. So clause 2 is either unnecessary or wrong—or both, simultaneously.
Fourthly, the Bill establishes in UK law a completely new doctrine of the separation of powers, as the ouster clauses, which prevent judges and tribunals from supervising the conduct of Ministers in operating the policy they have laid out in statute, put Ministers above the law. It is
not the sovereignty of Parliament that the Bill asserts, but the sovereignty of Ministers. Fundamental to the rule of law is the idea that the Crown—or its modern proxy, the Executive—cannot act arbitrarily, even if it uses its majority in Parliament to declare that it can. That would be the worst form of Henry VIII Act, equivalent to his Proclamation by the Crown Act 1539, which deemed that all the King’s proclamations, even though they were not approved by Parliament, shall be observed
“as though they were made by Act of Parliament.”
Fifthly, now is not the time to undermine human rights and the rules-based order. The UK relies on foreign courts and tribunals being effective. We watch events in Ukraine and declare that the butchery in Bucha or in Mariupol is a war crime. Who do we want to adjudicate that? We want an international court to do so. We rightly lecture China about human rights abuses in Xinjiang province and about abiding by the United Nations convention on the law of the sea. We invoke Magnitsky sanctions against human rights abusers around the world. How can we expect others to abide by the rule of law, and their human rights and other treaty obligations, if we abandon those things?
The right hon. and learned Member for Torridge and West Devon (Sir Geoffrey Cox) was right about one thing—incidentally, he was wrong about 2004, because what we did not do at that time was put in an ouster clause meaning that Ministers were free to do what they wanted. Those who think the Bill should go further will get no help from anyone on this side of the House, in any of the parties, in Committee or on Report. As we have heard, if the demands of the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) were to be met in amendments in Committee or on Report, Rwanda would withdraw, and the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst would withdraw his support for the Bill.
I do not know why anyone would vote for this Bill, but voting for it, despite knowing that it is legally offensive or believing it is fatally flawed, in the desperate hope that the Government will help you amend it, is just delaying the inevitable. I say that because the most extraordinary irony of all is that the Prime Minister has had to rely on the Rwandan Government to tell him and his MPs that Rwanda will not accept any law that breaches international law. Rwanda is theoretically and nominally democratic, but it is, in effect and in actuality, an authoritarian one-party state. That is who is keeping us on the straight and narrow legally. Just think about that before you vote for this nonsense.
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