My Lords, I support all these amendments. I have signed three of them, and the only reason I did not sign the fourth was because my name did not get there in time; there were already four names on it.
Let me talk most particularly for the moment in favour of Amendment 117. In one sense, we are going back to the Dublin treaty, Dublin III and the discussions we have had in the past. At the risk of taking up an extra minute, I will go in for a little moment of history. We had an amendment—which passed in this House and the Commons—to the 2017 Act which said that the Government should negotiate to continue the Dublin III arrangements even after we left the EU. That passed in the 2017 Act.
We thought we were there—but along came the 2019 Act, and it was taken out again. We could not understand why. It was fairly innocuous in one sense, but it was pretty important in another. I was summoned to a room, I think here, and there were three Ministers: the noble Baroness; Brandon Lewis, who was the Immigration Minister; and one of the Ministers from the Commons. There were seven other officials there, one from the Cabinet Office, and just me arguing with them—I thought the odds were pretty fair. Anyway, I was assured that we would lose nothing by abolishing that provision in the 2019 Act. It was never explained to me why the Government wanted to abolish it. If it was going to make no difference, why abolish it? If it was going to make a difference, why take a step backwards?
By all standards, the Dublin III provisions for family reunion were working—not brilliantly, not fast enough and not for enough children, but they were working.
I was assured that everything would be all right, but I am afraid that the evidence is not there. We cannot say often enough that where there are safe routes, the traffickers do not get any business. If we close the safe routes, the traffickers get business. It is logical, even for the Tory party. It is market economics, is it not? I do not understand how that can be contradicted.
I am worried about quite a number of the Government’s provisions. The Minister wrote a letter, which I have here; it is slightly depressing, but very helpful. However, I am worried that, on the whole, children in particular who got to Europe fleeing for safety are going to be ignored. I have not been there recently because of the pandemic, but the last time I visited what remains of Calais, people were sleeping under tarpaulins in terrible conditions. It was very depressing, and there were very depressing scenes on the Greek islands. I went to Lesbos, to Moria camp, just before the big fire there. Again, I am out of date now, but I understand that it has not got better. There are young people there who are desperate to join family members in this country. There are not many of them altogether, but there are enough for it to be an important point of principle. Surely, our test of humanity must be whether we support family reunion and whether refugee children can join their families here.
Safe Passage—a small but brilliant NGO with which I am happy to work and be closely associated—suggests that the majority of the children who qualified under Dublin III in the past would not qualify now. For all the optimistic noises coming from the Home Office, the fact is that the situation has got much more difficult in terms of getting children here.
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The Minister sent me a letter that I think other Members of the Committee have seen. It was interesting and had all sorts of arguments and so on, but of course it fell short in that, among other things, it did not tell us what has happened in the last year and a half since the new provisions have come in and we have closed down Dublin III. It seems to me that the numbers are not as optimistic as the Minister suggested. If I am wrong, that is fine, but I would like to see that spelled out.
I happened to bump into an Afghan driver who was desperate to get his family from Kabul but cannot—I do not think that his parents qualify. He has managed to find a way to send them money, so they are better off than most. But he is desperate; he cannot get them here.
We have had the arguments over the years, and I think that the right of children to join family members in this country—there is a small number of them, but this is important—is surely a fundamental principle of human rights. We cannot readily slam the door on them and say, “No, that does not count.”
I turn to Amendment 114, on international co-operation. I firmly believe that many of the issues around refugees—not just child refugees—will require better international co-operation and agreement than we have had up to now. For example, we were talking in earlier groups about redefining the 1951 Geneva convention. Surely the sensible thing would be for all countries to agree, rather than each country doing its
own thing and departing from the others, resulting in there being no basis for agreement at all. If we are going to send people back—I do not think that we can because no one is willing to take them—how can a person who is sent back, say from here to France, know how to make a claim if there is no agreement on the principles of the Geneva convention and the conditions are different?
I believe fundamentally that international co-operation on these issues is right, and that is why I am very keen on Amendment 114. But, above all, I argue that we must have a more generous humanitarian approach, particularly to child refugees seeking family reunion.