Nationality and Borders Bill — House of Lords, 2022-03-02
Topic: Immigration
Richard Rosser (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, Clause 15 puts into the Bill an existing immigration law on inadmissibility that makes any asylum claim inadmissible in a number of circumstances, including if the claimant has passed through, or has a connection to, a safe third country. The result of a finding of inadmissibility is that, unless the Secretary of State decides that there are exceptional circumstances, the claimant will be denied access to the UK’s asylum system for a "reasonable period", currently defined as six months in Home Office policy, while the UK seeks to transfer them to "any other safe country". With the huge backlog and delay currently in the system, it is impossible to understand how adding another six months to the asylum process will help an already dysfunctional system Clause 15 as it stands is neither acceptable nor deliverable in practice. We also have concerns on the definitions of "safe third state" and "connection", and on the lack of relevant international agreements. Serious concerns have been raised by the UNHCR and the cross-party Joint Committee on Human Rights, among others. There is an absence of adequate safeguards against returning individuals to countries to which they will be denied rights owed to them under the refugee convention Safe returns as part of an international asylum system are not new and are accepted under agreed conditions, but this clause does not provide for safe reciprocal return agreements. Even as it stands, the Government do not have returns agreements with EU member states, namely the safe third countries that refugees are most likely to have passed through. Instead, this provides for cases to be stalled and unilaterally declared inadmissible, without a requirement for a relevant returns agreement but on the basis of dubious connections to another state, where a person may or may not be able to enter an asylum system. We are talking here about asylum, not general immigration The clause provides that a claim is inadmissible if a person has a connection to a third state. It then clarifies that a connection can be made with a state that a person had never been to. It further clarifies that a person can be removed to a completely different state other than the one that they have been deemed to have a connection with. The UNHCR has described this as "a significant and highly problematic departure from international practice and UK case law." I will endeavour to be brief. I appreciate that this is Report and not a rerun of Committee, but in Committee the Government accepted on more than one occasion that we needed to have returns agreements in place. There was no direct answer given to a question asked by my noble friend Lord Dubs, who sought confirmation that to date we do not have an agreement with any country for the return of the people whom we are now talking about. This is about asylum. The answer no doubt is that we just do not have any such agreements. Despite saying in Committee on more than one occasion that we needed formal returns agreements in place to return people, the Government later went on to claim that we do not necessarily need formal return agreements in place, and that we could have "formal and informal, diplomatic and otherwise."—[Official Report, 3/2/22; col. 1106.] The reality is that we need formal return agreements in a situation where the number of people the Government intend to deem inadmissible will be high. In that situation, you cannot address this through unstated, unclear, ill-defined, informal ad hoc arrangements, as the Government seek to suggest. This clause is clearly based on the presumption that the Government can persuade other countries who already take greater asylum responsibility than the UK to accept people from the UK and agree to relieve us of a substantial part of the modest responsibility we currently take The reality of Clause 15 is that no such agreements are likely to materialise in the foreseeable future, as was clear from the debate in Committee. Dublin III has now gone and not been replaced. That is why my Amendment 32 provides the much-needed safeguards that Clause 15 can come into force only if the UK has safe returns agreements with third states and not before. I beg to move.