ASYLUM-SEEKERS won’t be protected in Rwanda by a “few sheets of paper” in a single treaty, the Bishop of Gloucester, the Rt Revd Rachel Treweek, said this week, because the House of Lords debated the deportation scheme.
Bishop Treweek told fellow peers: “The role of Government is indeed to create law, however it shouldn’t be to create injustices.” She backed a motion urging the Government to delay ratifying the treaty until asylum procedures were improved in Rwanda.
She said that traffickers and small boats needed to be stopped, and immigration, “after all”, had be controlled, but the talk was whether sending people to Rwanda was each secure and humane.
She said that it was “remarkable” that the Government was asking Parliament to declare Rwanda secure on the premise of a single treaty that, it claimed, answered all of the concerns of the Supreme Court.
“If Parliament does proceed, and effectively substitutes its judgment for that of the Supreme Court, I’d ask where that leaves the constitutional principle of the separation of functions. And what precedent is that this setting,” she said.
“Future assurances, nevertheless sincerely offered, usually are not on their very own a robust enough basis to legislate a rustic as secure.
“The Prime Minister has called on peers to ‘get on board and do the suitable thing’, but I fear that it can’t be right to guarantee ourselves that asylum-seekers can be protected by just a few sheets of paper.”
Parliament TVThe Bishop of Gloucester spoke in the talk within the House of Lords
Delay motions were introduced within the Lords by the Labour peer Lord Goldsmith, who chairs the chamber’s International Agreements Committee. The committee had presented a report identifying ten issues during which “significant legal and practical steps are needed as a way to implement the protections the treaty is designed to supply.”
Lord Goldsmith said: “We usually are not saying the treaty should never be ratified, but we’re saying that Parliament must have the chance to scrutinise the treaty and its implementing measures in full before it makes a judgement about [whether] Rwanda is secure.”
The UK’s former everlasting representative to the UN, Lord Hannay, said that the scheme broke international commitments, including the refugee convention, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the convention against torture, and possibly the European Convention on Human Rights.
“You cannot hope to be a reputable champion of the rules-based international order — because the Government, rightly for my part, aspire to be — and, at the identical time, pick and select which of those rules you yourself will proceed to honour.”
The motion urging delay was backed by peers by 214 votes to 171. It shouldn’t be binding on the Government, but is a firm indicator of the difficulties that the Government goes to come across in getting its Rwanda laws past the Lords.
