Tighten Border Security Bill to punish the perpetrators not the victims – JCHR report warns

• Read the report
• Read the report (PDF)
• Border security, Asylum and Immigration Bill
• Joint Committee on Human Rights

The Joint Committee on Human Rights welcomes the overall aims of the Bill to deter organised crime and prevent the loss of life at sea. However, it calls for a number of amendments to ensure that it better respects human rights protections and the UK’s obligations to international treaties.

The Bill includes new offences relating to immigration crime.  These offences risk being applied too broadly, the Joint Committee warns, putting refugees, victims of people smuggling and modern slavery at risk of being criminalised, rather than the smugglers. It calls for the scope of these new offences to be narrowed and stronger safeguards applied so that they target the perpetrators and not those seeking safety.

Chair comment

Publishing the report, Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Lord David Alton said:

“It is right that the Government does all it can to ensure a legislative framework is in place to help eradicate this terrible and dangerous criminality. But at present, the scope of the offences is too broad and the safeguards are too weak. 

“The Bill needs to target those who are profiting from organised immigration crime. The people they are exploiting need to be protected, but at present there is a risk that the most vulnerable are caught by these new offences.”

“Our report proposes a number of amendments to tighten up the Bill, to ensure it respects the UK’s human rights obligations and provides clarity and oversight of the powers allowed. It has the right intent but it needs to be watertight.”

Recommendations

Key conclusions and recommendations include:

• The new offences should be narrowed and the defences should be strengthened to ensure they target the perpetrators of organised immigration crime and not those seeking safety.
• There needs to be greater clarity on how powers to seize and retain electronic information relating to unlawful immigration would be used in practice.
• Clauses in the Bill that would allow the transfer of personal biometric data to other nations and international organisations remove vital data protections and should be scrapped.
• Some of the clauses in the Illegal Migration Act should be repealed.
• The report calls for restrictions on the imposition of conditions on persons with limited leave, such as electronic monitoring, geographical restrictions and curfews, so that they are applied only in cases of a serious threat to national security, public safety or cases involving serious crime.
• The Committee calls from a more stringent test to be applied to the use of electronic monitoring as part of Serious Crime Prevention Orders.

Further information

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