My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Trafford, said in her answer to a question earlier this week that Foreign Office issues are not her area of expertise. They are not mine either, but this Bill overlaps to some extent with my responsibilities on these Benches for home affairs. I have one question for the Minister on Clause 40 and the power to make provision relating to immigration appeals. If noble Lords will allow me, if we can deal with this matter today by means of a comment from the Minister in his summing-up, it will obviate the need for amendments later in the Bill’s passage.
As noble Lords will know, the Bill gives powers to Ministers to impose sanctions, and among those sanctions are immigration sanctions or the power to designate persons to be excluded persons for the purposes of Section 8B of the Immigration Act 1971. In essence, part of the sanctions package could be either to remove designated persons from the UK or to prevent their entering the UK. In addition, the Bill provides mechanisms for those affected to ask for the decision to impose sanctions to be reviewed, initially by a Minister and subsequently by the courts—as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hope of Craighead, has said, the Court of Session in Scotland and the High Court in the rest of the UK—including a decision to designate them as an excluded person. This would in effect be an appeal against the decision to impose the sanction.
An excluded person could also claim that they have a right to claim asylum in the UK, or that their human rights would be infringed if they were returned to their country of origin or refused entry to the UK. These would be appeals against the consequences of the imposition of the sanction, rather than appeals against the decision to impose the sanction itself. It is clearly important that these two potential routes to challenge either the decision to designate or the consequences of being designated are kept separate. My understanding is that that is what Clause 40 would allow the Government to do by regulation.
Clause 40 is quite complex and I wonder whether the Minister can reassure the House when he sums up that, as the Explanatory Notes appear to suggest at paragraphs 115 and 116, claims of asylum and human rights will continue to be dealt with by the Home Secretary—the Minister with the knowledge, experience and expertise to decide these matters—not the Minister
imposing the sanctions, and that any appeal against the Home Secretary’s decision would be to the Immigration and Asylum Chamber of the First-tier Tribunal, a specialist tribunal with expertise in deciding such claims, not the High Court or Court of Session, where an appeal against the imposition of the sanction would be heard. I appreciate that that is what is contained in the Explanatory Notes, but that does not have legal effect, whereas clarification from the Minister at the Dispatch Box would.
4.56 pm