Opinion UK Illegal Migration Bill violates even the British Human Rights Act

The proposed Bill was seconded by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who later rose to a podium proclaiming “Stop the Boats” and emphasised its urgency by reasoning that it is the British people and their government who should decide who enters the country, “and not criminal gangs.” However, as the Opposition’s shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper has pointed out in the time since, the Bill does nothing to tackle this problem. On the contrary, it is designed to let smugglers — three-quarters of whom live in the UK — off the hook, while completely ignoring the question of the hundreds of missing children who have been picked up from asylum hotels by these same criminal gangs.

Indeed, the UK’s existing prison and detention capacity is inadequate, in both numbers and security, for what the government considers an “overwhelming” tide of migrants already at its door. This is part of the motivation for the Bill as professed by its architects: this new Illegal Migration Bill is hinged on the idea that the UK is taking on more than what it considers its “fair share” of refugees, especially in light of the four-fold increase in small boat crossings following the closure of other immigration channels during the Covid pandemic. But given the complexities and expenses of detaining and deporting more and more people, the asylum system’s vulnerability to criminal gangs is more likely to shoot up rather than go down. Already, the convictions of people smugglers have more than halved, the backlog of asylum requests has soared, and removal rates for unsuccessful asylum seekers have gone down by 80 per cent compared to the figures under the country’s last Labour government. In such a situation, giving more bureaucratic load to the border forces seems every bit the “deeply damaging chaos” that the opposition claims it will be.

And that is not even half of it. The dangers of the Illegal Migration Bill have so far been masked under the language of “safeguarding”: Braverman’s statement outlined the Bill’s intent to introduce an annual cap on the number of refugees to be settled in the UK via “safe and legal routes”, an apparently “robust” and “compassionate approach”, which Sunak pronounced as a means for the British government to “take back control of our borders, once and for all.”

What both leaders obscure here is that many of these legal routes are presently available only to specific populations, such as Ukrainian refugees, 2,20,000 of whom were admitted to the country on special visas permitting work and benefits in the past year. Meanwhile, amongst those “illegally” crossing the English Channel — the primary targets of the proposed law — 40 per cent were fleeing similarly conflict-torn countries such as Afghanistan, Eritrea, Iran, Syria, and Sudan, which, with the exception of the first, do not have the benefit of these legal provisions for asylum. There is a racial logic at play here; some war refugees are more acceptable to the Tory consciousness than others. That two legislators of Indian origin introduced such a Bill is not insignificant either, considering it comes only a month after the UK Home Office declared Indians the third-largest group of migrants crossing into the UK via small and highly-unsafe boats. “Brown skin, white mask” is the easiest way for British conservatives to eliminate any accusations of the racial prejudice so ingrained in their operations and rationale.

But the new asylum Bill is not merely objectionable on these grounds. The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR has already expressed that it is “profoundly concerned” by the proposal, which it believes is in breach of the 1951 Refugee Convention and would, in effect, “amount to an asylum ban.” Indeed, Braverman was forced to include on the Bill’s very first page an off-hand admission of its incompatibility with Section 91B of the British Human Rights Act, which imbibes the Refugee Convention into the country’s human rights law by way of it being a founding member of the Council of Europe and signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights.

In a letter sent to conservative MPs and peers soon after her speech in the House of Commons, the Home Secretary further stated that there is a “more than 50 per cent chance” of the Bill being at odds with international law. However, as a member of a party that has seen through the British disavowal of the European Union, she nevertheless urged support from other MPs. likely eager to divest the government of all responsibility unto anything “European”. Whether the Bill passes or fails, it is poised to make an enemy of the Strasbourg Court and of human rights in general. And in disentangling itself from its human rights obligations, Britain is set to embrace with full force its legacy of racial exclusivity. Even the failure of the Bill will not so much be about the Tory party’s lack of determination but the Prime Minister’s inability to hold up to his pledge to stop the boats.

As an immigrant taking up precious space in the post-Brexit UK, I am all too aware of the conservative pattern to which this Bill is designed. Already the lines between “legal” and “illegal” are blurring, distinctions between “desirable” and “undesirable” migrants are being sharpened (consider the revised international student visa requirements and the laws prioritising “highly-skilled” overseas workers). For many Indians reading this, it is easy to believe that this “crackdown” on refugees will make more space for those of us with prestigious degrees and professional credentials. But credentials mean nothing when they come from the “other”, and if this Bill shows us anything, it is that this “other” — all of us — are to be slowly outlawed.

Rastogi is a writer currently based in London