My Lords, I will go where I was going without being distracted. I am aware that there is no Green group name on any of these amendments, which is the result of an administrative hitch earlier in the week, so I will be very brief—I am also aware of the hour. I shall make just three points about this group of amendments.
First, we have discussed the issue of retrospectivity a great deal. I align myself with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, among many others, who talked about approaching this as a lay person, which indeed I do as a non-lawyer. However, I have had a lot of contact with the law through my time as a journalist, and one of the things you learn is that the nature of the law is that they do not make laws retrospectively. That is in the general public understanding of what is law, so I associate myself with all the anti-retrospectivity amendments.
However, I particularly want to address Amendment 91, to which there has not been much attention given, which aims to prevent victims of human trafficking and modern slavery from having their leave retrospectively revoked to permit their deportation. This is leave granted to people under the Nationality and Borders Act 2022. I am sure many noble Lords taking part in this debate can think of victims of trafficking and modern slavery whom they have met. I am thinking of one in particular, whom I will not identify in detail. She was a person who had clearly been enormously mentally scarred by the experience of losing control of her own life and being a slave. To think that we would put them in this position again, having granted them status and then snatched it away, highlights the emotional damage that that would do to people.
Secondly, my favoured position is to write out this whole Bill but, if we do not do that, then that Clause 2 should not stand part. The noble Baroness, Lady Lister, made a powerful speech on this point. I want to raise a point no one else has raised. I ask the Minister to answer, although I expect he will be reluctant to, so maybe some of the other legal minds in the Committee can be put to this. Let us imagine that, after the next election, we have a change of government, and there has been written into law a duty for the Secretary of State to deport people. There is going to have to be an emergency Bill passed as soon as possible to stop that. I very much hope that would be the case for whoever the next the Government are. But there is going to be a total legal mess, I would imagine, when the people of
the country have elected a Government standing on a different platform—I would hope—but that is the law of the land. I am not sure where that would leave us; I do not know if anyone could help me with that one.
I also want to address why the duties to remove in Clause 2 should not remain. Some 90% of the people in need of international protection who come to the UK could not do so directly as defined by this Bill. The refugee convention prohibits states from imposing penalties on refugees for how they have entered the country, because most people have no choice but to enter a country irregularly. The convention explicitly states that you do not have to come directly to the country; there is no requirement of “first safe country”. That is the convention, yet we are writing this piece of this Bill. This clause simply must not stand part.
Thirdly, I want to identify particularly with Amendment 8. The noble Lord, Lord Cashman, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Etherton, have already made this argument very powerfully. All I want to say is that my Second Reading speech addressed this issue at some length, and I would like to stress the Greens’ support for Amendment 8 in particular.