My Lords, there can be no doubting the sensitivity in both political and social terms of the policy areas covered in the Bill to which we are giving a Second Reading today.
Immigration is of real concern to many of our fellow citizens. Over the past centuries, it has shaped this country, very often for the better; equally, there can be no doubting that this Bill touches on matters of not only domestic policy concern but Britain’s international obligations. It thus affects, for better or worse, the Government’s objective of developing a positive global role for our country in the 21st century. I will therefore concentrate my remarks on those parts of the Bill that are difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with our international obligations.
The provisions of the Bill dealing with asylum have been described by the UNHCR, the refugee agency, as
“fundamentally at odds with the Government’s … commitment to upholding the United Kingdom’s international obligations under”
the 1951 refugee convention and its 1967 protocol, and with
“the country’s long-standing role as a global champion for the refugee cause.”
That is strong language from an agency of the UN, which does not lightly criticise a member state which is not only a permanent member of its Security Council but also, over many years, one of its greatest donors. Nor can such criticism be lightly dismissed with subjective legal opinions; after all, why are we now discarding the interpretation of our obligations under the convention which we have applied for 70 years if it is not our intention unilaterally to contravene that interpretation?
However, if there are powerful reasons of principle for seeking to amend the provisions on asylum in the Bill, there are also powerful practical reasons for doing so. Is there any reason to believe that any third country will be ready to accept the offshoring of asylum seekers coming to this country? Certainly, a
leak that we might be contemplating trying to negotiate such facilities with Albania provoked an immediate and categorical denial. Moreover, it is surely an incontrovertible fact that no new measures for checking the illegal arrival of asylum seekers will be effective if we cannot secure the full co-operation of our continental neighbours, in particular France.
Does it really make sense in that context to legislate for solutions which have already been dismissed as unacceptable by those countries and contrary to international law? Would it not be wiser to talk first and then legislate? Is it not likely that any such co-operation will in any case require us to open ways in which asylum in the UK could be claimed and processed reasonably expeditiously before asylum seekers quite literally take their lives in their hands by embarking on a perilous Channel crossing?
Quite apart from those complications over asylum, the provisions in Clause 9 for depriving British subjects of their nationality without notice seem to contravene the UK’s obligations under the 1961 UN statelessness convention and would risk depriving their children of their right to a nationality under Article 24(3) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and Article 7(1) of the Convention on the Rights of the Child—the latter being particularly poignant to the present speaker as I sat beside Margaret Thatcher in 1990 when she signed it.
The problems caused by our long-standing international legal obligations would thus seem to be a sufficient reason to consider Clauses 9 and 11 of the Bill to be seriously flawed and needing amendment. To ignore these problems or to dismiss them will inflict real damage on one of the pillars of British foreign policy: our support for a rules-based international order. Ministers have stood time and again at the Dispatch Box in this place and in another place proclaiming our national interest in preserving and strengthening that order. For what it is worth, I believe them right to do so. But then measures are brought forward that run contrary to that order—as in the present case—which, if they entered into law, would undermine it. Twice already this House has successfully amended such Bills, in the cases of the internal market Act and the overseas operations Act, to bring them into conformity with our international obligations. I hope that this can be achieved in the present case too. If not, I fear the gap between our rhetoric and our practice could become too wide to bridge with any semblance of credibility.
6.41 pm