Date: 2023-04-26
Alison Thewliss: I will speak to the amendments that stand in my name and those of my hon. Friends. It is interesting to follow the right hon. Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith). Given his concerns about the Bill, I hope that he will join us in the Division Lobby later, because I do not expect that he will get the assurances that he hopes for from the Minister. The Bill remains an affront to human decency and to our obligations to our fellow human beings. It rips up hard-won international protections and is in breach of the European convention on human rights, the refugee convention, the Council of Europe's convention on action against trafficking in human beings and the UN convention on the rights of the child. The Children and Young People's Commissioner of Scotland has said that the Illegal Migration Bill "represents a direct assault on the concept of universality of human rights and the rule of law." Organisations have lined up to condemn the Bill, from the UNHCR, Liberty, Amnesty International, trade unions and medical bodies. It seeks to turn ships' captains and train drivers into border guards, and it creates a sub-class of people in immigration limbo forever. This refugee ban Bill is based on myths, mistruths and the myopic pursuit of clicks and tabloid headlines. There is no evidence whatsoever to support the wild claims made by the Home Secretary and her acolytes. The Bill will not meet its stated aims, but it will cost lives. It fails to provide safe and legal routes, and it will cause untold suffering. It diminishes the UK in the eyes of the world and it yanks on the thread that will unravel refugee protections across the world. The Bill delivers people who have been trafficked back into the hands of those who would exploit them. In his article published this morning in ConservativeHome, the Immigration Minister descended yet further, speaking of those with "different lifestyles and values" cannibalising compassion. That is not a dog whistle but a foghorn. The process by which the Government have brought forward the Illegal Migration Bill is an insult to democracy and to the House. It has been rushed through without a full Committee stage or evidence sessions--no evidence whatsoever from the Government about the things they have put forward. Swathes of Government amendments have been brought forward today in haste, but there has not yet been an impact assessment, even at this very late stage. It is unacceptable that we are being asked to vote on something without an impact assessment. My hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) has requested an impact assessment umpteen times in the House and via a freedom of information request, but nothing has yet been forthcoming. I know the hon. Member for Bristol West (Thangam Debbonaire) has also been tirelessly pursuing an impact assessment of the Bill. It is testimony to the Government's dogged evasion of scrutiny, not to their lack of effort, that that has been fruitless. As Members of Parliament, we are guarantors of rights. The SNP's amendment 45 seeks to hold the UK Government to their international obligations--how utterly bizarre and reprehensible that we even have to introduce an amendment to ensure that--and to attempt to have the provisions in the Bill line up with convention rights in the UN refugee convention, the European convention on action against trafficking, the UN convention on the rights of the child and the UN convention relating to the status of stateless persons. Anyone reading the UNHCR legal observations on the Illegal Migration Bill can plainly see how far the UK Government are deviating from international norms. Those observations say: "The Bill all but extinguishes the right to claim asylum in the UK...breaches the UK's obligations towards stateless people under international law...would lead to violations of the principle of non-refoulement...would deny refugees and stateless people access to their rights under international law." They go on to say that the Bill violates article 31(1) and 31(2) of the UN refugee convention and international human rights law, "puts at risk the safety and welfare of children" and "would increase the pressure on the UK asylum system". What an atrocious mess this Government are making. Further to this condemnation from the UNHCR, the Council of Europe's group of experts on action against trafficking in human beings stressed that, if adopted, the Bill would run contrary to the United Kingdom's obligations under the anti-trafficking convention to prevent human trafficking and to identify and protect victims of trafficking, without discrimination. The Home Secretary appears to misunderstand the very nature of modern slavery and human trafficking, as right hon. and hon. Members on the Government Benches have outlined. Perhaps that could be accounted for by the lack of an independent anti-slavery commissioner, as the post has now been standing vacant for a year. The previous holder of the post, Professor Dame Sara Thornton, gave evidence to the Home Affairs Committee last week on how the national referral mechanism actually works. I suggest the Immigration Minister should have read that evidence before coming to the House with such proposals as he has today. New clause 26 replaces the placeholder clause 51 and gives the Government the power to ignore interim measures from the European Court of Human Rights and remove people who would otherwise have not been removed. The clause hands powers to Government Ministers to unilaterally decide whether the UK should uphold its international obligations. Liberty has described this as a concerning shift of power away from Parliament and towards the Executive. Yet again we are seeing the stripping away of crucial checks and balances--another Westminster power grab that has become a hallmark of this Government. I tell you what this is really about, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is about setting up a fight with the European Court of Human Rights. It is about setting out to breach international law. It is about sleight of hand and deflection from the Conservatives' failure to get a grip on the immigration backlog that they created. They think that if the public are somehow distracted by judges in their jammies, they will forget about the incompetence of the Minister. I give my constituents and people up and down these islands more credit than that--their heids don't button up the back. One of the most egregious aspects of the Bill is its impact on children. The Children's Commissioners are crystal clear about the harm that it will cause; the Minister should heed their calls. The Scottish National party is happy to support new clauses 2 and 3 on pregnancy, given the impact on both the mother and the child in the circumstances; amendments 2 and 3 and new clause 14 on safe and legal routes and family reunion for children; amendment 5 on unaccompanied children; and new clause 4 on an independent child trafficking guardian. I commend to the House the work of the Scottish Guardianship Service in Scotland, which is run by Aberlour and the Scottish Refugee Council. It does a diligent job of advocating for the young people in its care. It is beneath contempt that the UK Government would seek to overrule the Scottish Parliament's obligations to children and young people, effectively preventing the service from carrying out its work of rebuilding the lives of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Our amendment 54 would prevent the UK Government from extending their harmful proposals on unaccompanied children to the devolved nations without their consent. We want to do better by our bairns, and it is despicable that the UK Tory Government would block our democratically elected Government from doing so. Government new clauses 24 and 25 on age assessments are utterly ridiculous. They seek to treat people automatically as adults if they refuse to consent to an age assessment method, which goes against the Home Office's own advice from last year. The Government calls those methods scientific, but the reality is that they are highly contentious. The British Dental Association has challenged the pseudoscience of such methods, saying that the dental checks "fail basic tests on accuracy and ethics". The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health says: "Scientific evidence shows that pubertal assessment and bone age assessment are unreliable indicators of age and therefore cannot be used." Gemma Jones, the chair of Unison's science, therapy and technical occupational group, said that the plans "break the code of conduct of radiography staff and their legal duties for radiation protection by instructing them to expose vulnerable individuals to ionising radiation without consent and without any medical need, for a procedure that is not reliable to determine age." That is important because such methods will determine whether children get thrown in with adults--a clear safeguarding risk. The appeals process is practically impossible and the consequences can be catastrophic. The Scottish Guardianship Service has given the example of Shireen, who was 13 when he fled Afghanistan in 2008. When he arrived in the UK two years later, the Home Office treated this 15-year-old as an adult and refused his case. He has said: "That time was very difficult for me...I didn't know where I could go or what I could do. I had nothing. And nobody believed my case." The Scottish Guardianship Service was able to support Shireen and help him to rebuild his life. Under the Bill, that would not be possible.