3
Examination of witnesses
Zoe Bantleman, Beatrice Stern and Tyrone Steele.
Q1 Chair: Good afternoon. Welcome to today’s meeting of the Joint Committee on Human Rights. We are a cross-party committee and a Joint Committee, which means that we have members from both the House of Commons and the House of Lords.
Today we are holding the first session of our legislative scrutiny of the Safety in Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill 2023. We will hear from three witnesses, and we will focus our questioning on the compliance of the Bill with the United Kingdom’s human rights obligations, in particular those arising from the European Convention on Human Rights but also the refugee convention.
I will start by introducing our witnesses. In no particular order, we have Zoe Bantleman, the legal director of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association. Prior to joining ILPA, Zoe was a barrister at Richmond Chambers with a practice in immigration, nationality and asylum law. She is a contributing author to Practical Law and an editorial board member of the Journal of Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Law. Thank you for joining us, Zoe.
Next, we have Beatrice Stern, the Refugee Council’s head of public affairs and policy. The Refugee Council is a charity working with refugees and people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom. It was founded back in 1951 following the creation of the UK refugee convention and works with over 13,000 women, men and children each year providing crisis advice, mental health counselling and practical support. You are very welcome, Beatrice.
Thirdly, but not least, we have Tyrone Steele, the interim legal director of the organisation JUSTICE. JUSTICE’s work spans administrative, civil, family and criminal justice in the UK. After studying theology at the University of Oxford, Tyrone trained and qualified as a lawyer, having acted on several pro bono human rights cases.
I should declare an interest, in that I am on the advisory council of JUSTICE, although I have had no involvement in the preparation of the advice that JUSTICE has prepared on this Bill.
Without further ado, I move to our first question, which comes from Bell Ribeiro-Addy.
Q2 Bell Ribeiro-Addy: Zoe and Beatrice in particular, if the Safety in Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill becomes law and operates alongside existing legislation, including the Illegal Migration Act, who will be affected and how will it affect them in practice?
Beatrice Stern: It is a really interesting question. It is our view that the Rwanda plan will not actually deal with the problem of the backlog of people who are already in the country and who will continue to come. Since the Act got Royal Assent in July last year, and up to the end of last year, 33,000 asylum cases entered the backlog. Once a duty to remove is commenced, if claims have not been processed by then, those claimants will be subject to the duty to remove, as would any dependants of those claimants, and they could have their claim declared permanently inadmissible.
Over 15,000 of the 33,000 we saw enter the system in the second half of last year were people who had made the dangerous journey across the channel, so we estimate that almost all of them would be inadmissible. These are men, women and children who have made that very dangerous journey and whose claims will be inadmissible and subject to the duty to remove.
The Government would say that the Rwanda plan is uncapped, but in reality it is clear that the capacity of the plan, certainly in its early stages, will be only in the hundreds. So you have a number of hundreds perhaps being removed to Rwanda but a total of 15,000-plus who are in the backlog, in permanent limbo, with no plan to deal with them and no ability to move on with their lives.
Zoe Bantleman: It might assist if I addressed the legislation side of things and how this Bill builds on previous legislation. Fundamentally, it builds and relies on the removal provisions in other pieces of immigration legislation. In fact, it refers to the immigration Acts. That includes the Illegal Migration Act 2023, but it also runs all the way back to the Immigration Act 1971. Theoretically, any person who may be removed under any of those pieces of immigration legislation would come within the scope of this new Rwanda Bill.
As Beatrice said in relation to the Illegal Migration Act 2023, that is likely to affect tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands, in the coming years. There are other provisions—for example, Section 10 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999—which allow for the removal of family members of people who are liable for removal. So it is not only the Government’s flagship Illegal Migration Act 2023 under which individuals might be removed to Rwanda, but prior pieces of legislation.
Q3 Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws: As you know, the Supreme Court concluded that Rwanda was not a safe country to send asylum seekers to. The Government have stated that their new treaty with Rwanda resolves the issues that led the Supreme Court to that conclusion. They say that the system has now been fixed; it may have taken us hundreds of years to get to the point where we really had due process and the rule of law, but it has been done in a couple of months for Rwanda. This Bill would require the courts to treat Rwanda as safe. Do you think that Rwanda is now a safe country? If not, why not?
Tyrone Steele: I do not think the Government think that Rwanda is a safe country either. Let me explain. If we take a step back, as you say, the Supreme Court judgment was fairly comprehensive in its assessment of Rwanda and the deficiencies of Rwanda as a place to send migrants and refugees. The Supreme Court highlighted many different factors with respect to that, such as poor compliance with international obligations and past failures, as well as poor understanding of the refugee convention. There were 100% rejection rates of categories of individuals from Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen in the period 2020 to 2022, while it is the inverse scenario here in the UK; those cohorts have very high success rates here. The human rights record was poor, with poor access to legal remedy. Judicial and legal representation and independence are poor in Rwanda. There is a whole panoply of factors that led the Supreme Court to make that factual assessment.
What did the Government do when the Supreme Court gave its judgment back in November? Instead of taking a step back and saying, “Okay, we tried our best, but the policy isn’t working and reality has taken us this far”, they tried fundamentally to change reality. That is what this Bill does. It prevents the courts making that factual assessment again. It tries to create the legal fiction that Rwanda is safe, despite the fact that the Supreme Court found on the basis of all the evidence that that is not the case. It attempts to shield government decision-making from any further inquiry on that issue.
Chair: I am terribly sorry, but I will have to suspend the meeting, because there is a vote in the House of Commons. I am not sure whether there is one or more. We will suspend for about 10 minutes.
The Committee suspended for Divisions in the House of Commons.
The Committee adjourned.
