Thanks, Órfhlaith. All those are important points and well made. During the passage of the Bill into law through the Parliament in Westminster, it was clear that the common travel area and Irish land border were not mentioned. They were not mentioned in the Bill or the explanatory memorandum, and the Government was not able to give good answers to questions raised by a number of parliamentarians on the issues affecting people on both sides of the Border. The common travel area is a key protection for people living here and throughout the UK but it did not seem to feature in their consideration of the realities of the cross-Border lives that the North West Migrants Forum has been focusing on. The rights protections in the Good Friday Agreement have a North-South dimension. The Windsor Framework commits, among its key goals, to maintaining North-South co-operation, avoiding a hard border – and we are not just talking about lorries and goods – and protecting the provisions of Good Friday Agreement. All are key objectives. The application of the Illegal Migration Act to the reality of lives lived in Ireland has serious consequences for the agreement and for Article 2 of the Windsor Framework, and seems to be in conflict with both. When the Ministers in the Home Office were designing the legislation, their focus was on the headlines they create around small boats and the Channel, and not about Border crossing within Ireland.
It was notable during the parliamentary debate that a number of parliamentarians raised these issues, but without getting good responses. Stephen Farry, the Alliance MP, tabled an amendment in the Commons which would have provided an exemption from the duty to remove people who arrive in the UK from the Republic via the land border with Northern Ireland. It was not accepted for debate and therefore there was no adequate debate on it. What Stephen Farry said at the time cuts to the heart of the issue:
Once again, Home Office legislation fails to take into account the realities of the common travel area and particularly movements on the island of Ireland. Although there is an open border with no routine immigration checks, UK immigration law continues to apply, and people who cross into the UK, particularly on the island of Ireland, remain at risk of immigration enforcement and legal jeopardy if they are found to be in breach of [the] immigration rules. Under clause 2 [of the Act], someone who enters the UK via Northern Ireland risks potential detention, deportation to a third country or their home country, and even a ban on ever returning.
Claire Hanna also introduced an amendment dealing with the issue of people crossing the Border for the proposes of tourism and also around protecting the guarantees under Article 2. Those amendments and interventions were not accepted so we did not see them working their way into the legislation.
CAJ, in its work on the Bill during its passage, cited an exemplar of a Kenyan national residing legally in Donegal who might travel into Derry for shopping but not have the correct paperwork. They could risk being detained indefinitely. That initially would be in Larne House, a temporary immigration detention facility in the town of Larne. They can only be detained for up to seven days there and thereafter are moved to immigration detention for the longer term in GB. They would not have proper recourse to the courts to challenge such detention and would risk potential removal to a third country. We are not talking about moving back to the Republic of Ireland; it could be onwards to wherever. The Government at least until yesterday had - and, it seems from what they have said since, still has – in mind that that third country is potentially Rwanda.
The supreme court judgment in London yesterday on the Rwanda scheme upheld the appeal court decision, basically saying the scheme is unlawful and that it is a risk to people to remove them to Rwanda. Particularly, they face the risk of refoulement or being returned to the country they fled in the first instance. The court found that Rwanda is not a safe country in terms of human rights and that its asylum processing is massively faulty. They do not consider human rights properly and routinely turn down applications for asylum from countries where, if those applications were made in the UK, routinely they would be accepted.
On the face of it, this leaves the Illegal Migration Act in tatters in that underpinning the Act was the concept of removals to Rwanda. That was essentially unspoken throughout the Act. However, we have seen since that Government ministers, including the Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary, have been somewhat confused in terms of the messages they have put out. They are talking about withdrawing or not withdrawing from the European convention or passing legislation which would exempt them somehow from the provisions of that convention. They seem to have settled on a two-pronged approach. First is a revised treaty with Rwanda they say they are working on at the moment that would address the concerns raised by the supreme court. I do not understand how a new treaty with Rwanda will address the issues decided on yesterday by the supreme court in terms of the human rights record of Rwanda and its faulty decision-making processes for asylum applications. Second, they would pass emergency legislation. We do not know what might be in that legislation but, as a human rights campaigner, the words “emergency legislation” always deeply concern me. This legislation, as I noted earlier, was rushed through Parliament without adequate scrutiny. With the huge majority the Government currently has, it is able to pass legislation that is ill-conceived, badly constructed and in breach of international law. As Ms Begley noted, the Government was not able to give proper assurances that this did not breach its obligations under the European convention and increasingly seems flagrant in its disregard for those obligations and, indeed, to the heart of this legislation, obligations under the UN refugee convention.
We shall have to see what they bring forward to address the ruling yesterday. What we have heard so far does not fill us with hope that they will take it to heart. They need to abandon the Rwanda scheme and their wider mission of refusing to process asylum claims made lawfully in the UK, and do that more promptly than they have to date. There is a huge backlog of claims they have failed to process. Since the passage of this legislation in July, all of those claims, which, frankly, are lawful asylum claims, have not been accepted or processed, so there is an ever-growing backlog of people awaiting consideration of their asylum claims.
We think they should put in place a whole new approach to asylum in the UK. That does not seem to be on the cards. Any further attempts to block off the European convention and the UK’s obligations under it certainly concerns us and should concern this committee with respect to people in Northern Ireland. The European convention and the EU directives, which still apply in Northern Ireland in the aftermath of the Windsor Framework, do not just apply to citizens in Northern Ireland, whether British or Irish citizens; they apply to anyone who is here. That means they also apply to people seeking asylum.
The Government has tried, with this legislation, to set aside those obligations. We may see more of this, as regards its response to the supreme court ruling yesterday. The Human Rights Commission's case now becomes all the more important in addressing key questions around asylum policy. The commission's remit and the Windsor Framework only apply to Northern Ireland so there may, depending on how the court determines, be exemptions for people in Northern Ireland and claims made there that would not be applicable more widely in the UK. That might provide some narrow relief but important points may emerge from that court case around the wider UK asylum policy and what it is trying to do with the immigration Act.
Concerning the Irish Government and this committee, there needs to be vigilance. While the UK Government may not withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, which would be an outrageous step - following Putin's Russia in withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights - nothing can be ruled out given some of the noises from the back benches, at least. They used to be on the front benches, talking about withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights. It is still a threat that hangs over all of the debate around this issue. There is an Irish interest in protecting the Good Friday Agreement and all its parts, including the chapter on human rights and equality safeguards for people on the island. As I noted, there are implications for people residing in the Republic of Ireland as well as in Northern Ireland. There is a wider issue off the back of this Act around the proposed electronic travel authorisations and how that might affect tourists on the island. That is perhaps not a matter so much for Amnesty International but the tourism bodies have already raised concerns about it. Any hardening of the land border, to whomever it applies, should be of concern.
