My Lords, I thank the House for allowing me to speak in the gap.
Only days ago, the King made solemn commitments to justice, equity and mercy—and here we are, dismissing those values in this Bill. I find it repugnant to hear the spurious use of market-force values as an argument for the Bill: that the need to crush traffickers, the supply side, involves having to crush demand, as though the demand were not human beings with needs. They are often people who have been persecuted or who have watched other members of their family being slaughtered. They may have suffered torture themselves and witnessed the women in their family being raped. But we have to crush demand, so to devise a scheme as cruel and as vicious as possible is necessary to deflect people from crossing. We have to devise a scheme that has no due process—which has been one of the fundamentals in our rule of law—and we are going to lump together those who are asylum seekers with those among them who possibly might be here simply to better themselves. The noble Lord, Lord Frost, has just talked about this, but described those people as being asylum seekers. The conflation of those who might be coming for economic reasons and those who are asylum seekers fleeing persecution is one of the problems of this Bill.
I want to speak to the fact that this Bill is having a huge impact on our global reputation. I am the director of an institute for the International Bar Association, so I travel to conferences regularly; I was only last week at the UN in New York. Judges and lawyers talk to me about their concerns with what is happening around issues of law in our country. They say, “What is happening to Britain—the Britain that led the world in championing the rule of law; that was the flagship nation in creating the rules-based order after World War II; that drafted the European Convention on Human Rights and was key to so many conventions, including the refugee convention, and created the model for the modern slavery legislation that is being taken up in other countries?” “We have always looked to Britain”, they say, “As a beacon that we have all been persuading our countries to follow, but what is happening?” We are putting at risk that reputation. Our stature in the world will be greatly damaged by Bills such as this and
by our dismissal of our treaty obligations and commitment to international law. The fear expressed is that Britain, by showing a reckless disregard for law, will bring about the collapse of that rules-based system because in other countries authoritarianism is growing, as we know, and so many places will be only too happy to follow suit.
I remind us all of the law of unintended consequences: once you start unravelling these things—such as, for example, rule 39, which we have used since 2005; we used it only last year in relation to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—it will be used as evidence that we have failed to comply with it when we come to bring people such as Putin before the international courts for war crimes. Please do not unravel law which has been so important in creating a unity across the globe that has been vital in securing justice and in our attempts to secure peace.
I advocate what the most reverend Primate the Archbishop has advocated: that we should cling to those international obligations and sets of principles, make use of them and engage with other countries to try to meet the challenges here. We should set up proper, swift systems to determine who are asylum seekers and who are not.
I hope this Bill will be amended out of existence because it is unworkable and unlawful, and it is immoral, I say to all of you. We have to ask ourselves: is this what we are standing for in the world?
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