The Government reforms of the asylum system, as proposed in the Nationality and Borders Bill, would fail to meet the UK’s human rights obligations and risk exacerbating the already unacceptable backlog of claims, a report by the Joint Committee on Human Rights has found.
The report warns that legislating to create different categories of refugee based on how they came to the UK would be inconsistent with the Refugee Convention and potentially a discriminatory breach of human rights. Instead of combatting people smugglers, the legislation would penalise asylum claimants for not utilising ‘safe and legal routes’ that lack sufficient capacity to support them. This and other proposed reforms, including permitting more asylum claims to be rejected without consideration and introducing the possibility of offshore processing of asylum claims, risk undermining the humanitarian and cooperative principles on which refugee protection is founded.
The Committee also warns that the Government’s intention to lower the threshold for giving the benefit of the doubt to age-disputed individuals may lead to more children being wrongly identified as adults, with severe consequences which would amount to a denial of children’s rights. The Committee is also concerned about the powers which would be given to the Secretary of State to allow for the use of scientific methods to assess age and finds there is no justification for their use given their inaccuracy.
The Bill also removes the obligation on the Secretary of State to give notice of deprivation of citizenship orders in certain circumstances, including in the interests of national security, foreign relations, and the public interest. The Committee finds that avoiding the duty to give notice to an individual who is being stripped of their rights undermines the principle of fairness and that this should be removed from the Bill.
Deputy Chair of the Joint Committee on Human Rights, Joanna Cherry QC MP said:
“The UK has a proud history of championing the human rights of refugees. We should continue in this tradition and do all we can to be a place of welcome and support for people who have been persecuted. The bill is at odds with the refugee convention and with our human rights obligations and should be amended.
“Rather than coming up with new punitive measures and lambasting the difficulties in rejecting asylum applications, the Government should focus on dealing with the lengthy backlog of cases. This needs to be achieved by better processing and adequate resourcing. Instead we have measures that would harm decision making, through needlessly penalising the late submission of evidence, and even cause further delays due to the new consideration of whether asylum seekers should have applied to another country first.
“Fundamentally this bill increases the likelihood that the UK turns its back on people it should be helping. This would be wrong and the Government needs to rethink these proposals.”
