Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill

Baroness Hamwee Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 3rd September 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 203E, to which the noble Lord has just referred. I certainly do not seek to take issue with the noble Lord, Lord Browne.

I appreciate that we are in very topical territory, and I confess that I found it quite difficult to know how to approach this Bill following the Statement on Monday, because there is a lot to come—and I know that the Minister will tell us that we will have the opportunity to debate it, but of course we do not have that much detail and we are being asked to consider a Bill written before that Statement. We will have opportunities to consider the Home Office’s proposals, and today’s debates will give the Minister a flavour—if he needs it, because I do not think that he will be surprised by very much that is said today—of what is to come by way of our responses.

I, too, am grateful to the various organisations that have briefed us on Section 59. They have clearly spelled out the distinction between asylum and human rights claims and, as they say, human rights claims in many cases have nothing to do with a country’s general safety, or perceived safety. They are about someone’s connections to this country and their dependency and family ties here—as I said, this is topical—and are made by people seeking lawfully to enter or remain with their UK-based family. Among other things, this means that there is no right of appeal, because claims are not refused, they are just not considered. Of course—and it is “of course” to me, as the noble Lord, Lord Cashman, said—a country may be safe generally, but not to particular groups or sections of the community. The Supreme Court has recognised that a serious risk of persecution can exist as a general feature of life that applies to a recognisable section of the community.

This amendment takes us back to the 2002 Act, which Section 59 amends. That Act allows for exceptional circumstances, and what they may include is a subject of my amendment, in what would be the proposed new Section 80A(5A), which would provide that they include where

“the claimant is at substantial risk of significant personal harm, either as a member of a minority group or as an individual”.

The amendment would also omit Albania, Georgia and India from the list of countries that are automatically “safe” for everyone.

Noah has been mentioned—and, in fact, he was my example for Georgia, where there is a lack of effective state protection for LBGTQI+ people in the face of considerable violence. To add to what has been said, he said:

“No one can know you are gay. If you are gay, your two options are either hospital or exorcism”.


This man was attacked by his own family, forced to stay in a hospital for people with mental illnesses and subjected to exorcism.

The Home Office country note for India refers to gender-based violence, with women and girls in rural areas or from certain castes and tribes especially vulnerable. Institutional prejudices—violence against Muslims, Christians and certain castes and tribes—go unpunished. Indeed, the country note describes the active involvement of the police. In Albania, trafficking is rife. It is one of the top three nationalities—whether you regard that as the top three or the bottom three—of people referred to the national referral mechanism and recognised to be victims of trafficking. It is internationally recognised that domestic and international trafficking, including trafficking to the UK, is rife, and the families of victims themselves are threatened.

I have been involved with the case of a young man —he was young when he came; his application has not been determined yet—where the threat to his family has been a major factor in his response to what has affected his life. Sexual and domestic violence is widespread in Albania. Wherever we are going in legislative terms with this, we have to recognise the situation that noble Lords have already described.

[Lord Murray of Blidworth (Con)]

I will address Amendment 203J. I declare my interest as a barrister practising in public law and in the immigration space.

As noble Lords will have noticed, Amendment 203J does not sit happily with the other amendments in this group. It is not directly about the inadmissibility of an asylum claim, but it is on a very important point. The refugee convention of 1951 says that, if an asylum seeker has entered the country illegally, he is not to be punished or penalised for doing so, provided he came directly from a territory where his life or freedom was threatened by persecution. Specifically, it says:

“The Contracting States shall not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened, in the sense of Article 1”—


the persecution provision in the convention—

“enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence”.

As Professor John Finnis, professor emeritus of law and legal philosophy at Oxford, and I pointed out in our paper published in 2021 by Policy Exchange entitled Immigration, Strasbourg, and Judicial Overreach, the drafting and proper meaning of Article 31(1) of the refugee convention were compellingly expanded by Lord Rodger of Earlsferry and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mance, dissenting in the case of the Crown v Asfaw 2008, UK House of Lords 31. In doing so, they demonstrated the error of the living instrument interpretation advanced by the majority in that case and by the Divisional Court in the case of the Crown v Uxbridge Magistrates’ Court, ex parte Adimi, 2001 Queen’s Bench 667. The erroneous but reigning interpretation in Adimi is predicated on the notion, plainly rejected by the draftsmen of Article 31 of the refugee convention, that refugees passing through safe country A en route to safe country B and/or C and/or D and/or E should have the option to choose to seek asylum in B, C, D or E.

This is plainly wrong and not what was intended by the state parties when they signed the refugee convention in 1951. It is time that we corrected the law in this regard. Amendment 203J, together with Amendment 203I in my name, which is to be debated in a later group, restores the proper meaning of “coming directly”. In doing so, it provides a solution to the nightmare of the dangerous channel crossings and uncontrolled entry. I suggest that the refugee convention purposefully distinguishes between those who enter directly from a country where they are in danger and those who do not. There is no immunity from immigration law for those not coming directly; this was entirely intentional.

This amendment aims to vindicate the distinction and seeks to bring an end to the practice of widening the refugee convention beyond the terms that the United Kingdom and the other states agreed. Let us look at the terms of Amendment 203J. The Secretary of State would have a duty to refuse a claim for asylum if a person meets the conditions set out. The first condition, in proposed new subsection (2), is that they require leave to enter the United Kingdom and they have done so without such leave, whether illegally or otherwise. The second condition, in proposed new subsection (3), is that

“in entering or arriving as mentioned in subsection (2), the person did not come directly to the United Kingdom from a country in which the person’s life and liberty were threatened by reason of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion”.

Those words are taken from the convention. Proposed new subsection (4), for clarity, specifies:

“For the purposes of subsection (3) a person is not to be taken to have come directly to the United Kingdom from a country in which their life and liberty were threatened as mentioned in that subsection if, in coming from such a country, they passed through or stopped in another country outside the United Kingdom where their life and liberty were not so threatened”.


To make it absolutely crystal clear, proposed new subsection (5) says:

“For the removal of doubt but without limitation, for the purposes of subsection (3), a person has passed through or stopped in another country outside the United Kingdom if they depart in a boat, vessel or aircraft from France or any other European coastal state”.


If this provision were enforced, would you risk your life in the channel in a small boat if you knew that your asylum claim would be bound to be refused? You would not.

This amendment—to use the slogan so favoured by the Prime Minister—would smash the gangs by destroying the business model, and do so while we remain a member of the refugee convention. Unlike the timid tinkering around the edges we see in almost all of this rather performative Bill as presently proposed, this amendment proposes a real, beneficial solution and the Home Office should grab it with both hands.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is not just ordinary people who do not understand it. I do not understand it at all, logically. Mind you, I am an ordinary person.

The discussion so far has been very helpful in raising some key issues that the country is preoccupied with. The sensible way to approach this, which people have started to do, is to say that there should be a proper, open debate on it. We need to have a proper discussion about whether the 1951 refugee convention is appropriate for 2025 and very different circumstances. Some of the amendments have allowed us to reflect on that.

Every word of the speech by the noble Lord, Lord Empey, was on the money—absolutely hear, hear. We sometimes have discussions in this Chamber that bear little relationship to the political, social and cultural context of what everybody else in the country is talking about. There have been times during this debate in which the discussion about what constitutes safety and fleeing unsafe countries gives us a hint as to how we have got into a very serious political crisis in this country. The definition of what constitutes unsafe, the definition of what constitutes asylum and the definition of what constitutes refugee have become so expansive that it is a miracle or a mystery to me that anyone has been deported. If anyone was listening, you would just think, “Oh well, we can’t do anything”.

To give an example of some of the things that were argued, I was involved in a debate on the radio some months ago about whether Albania was a safe country. The example given was one that has been cited here today about the levels of domestic violence in Albania. I pointed out that most of the people that I had seen in the small boats who were Albanian did not look like they were the victims of domestic violence. Given the historic split, sex-wise, in terms of domestic violence, they might well have been the abusers.

I point this out only because, every time you say, “Surely, there is no reason why they should be in this country; they are from a safe country”, people will say, “No they’re not”, and you get left in a situation where you cannot remove them.

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

My Lords, I will make the point, before the noble Baroness moves on, that that is exactly the point that many of us are making—you cannot generalise. I will just put it that way.

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

I was about to go on to quote the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, who said that a country may be safe generally but not for a particular section of the population. The noble Baroness more or less made the point there that she has just made now about not generalising. I agree that it is difficult to say, “This is a safe country” or “This is not”. The problem I have is that we have a situation where we either say, “These countries are not safe” or “Every country can be safe, but not to some groups of people”. We end up, therefore, saying that the whole world, and sections of the whole world, are likely to be unsafe and the people there can come to the UK. We cannot be in a situation where we open up to everybody from around the world who is in an unsafe situation.

By the way, that would also be true of this country, when it comes to the threat of violence against women and girls. You could say that the UK is a safe country. Let me tell you that it has not been a safe country in hundreds of towns for thousands and thousands of young women, girls and children who were sexually abused and raped in their thousands, in an industrial fashion, in the “safe” country of the United Kingdom. I am not prepared to generalise, but we cannot simply say that, because of the lived experience of those individuals who have suffered at the hands of others in other countries, it should be automatically assumed that they can move to the United Kingdom.

Finally, therefore, I want to ask for some guidance from the Minister on the status of the Bill. I read through a lot of the sections and notes in preparation for what I was going to say today and for other forthcoming days in Committee, and I thought, “Oh my goodness, this Bill is completely out of date”. I do not mean it is out of date as far as I am concerned but rather as far as the Government are concerned. Looking at a number of the amendments I have put my name to, I now look like a lily-livered liberal type in comparison with some of the comments made by Labour Government Ministers on the Front Benches. I suddenly thought, “Oh, I was being rather tentative there on the European Court of Human Rights and so on”. But it is full throttle—the Home Secretary covering herself in Union Jacks and flags, as she has told us. I thought, “I don’t know where to go now”.

In all seriousness, the Government have said, perfectly reasonably, that parliamentary time is short in general, and we all know that the Bill is under a lot of scrutiny. There are an awful lot of amendments to the Bill. Would it be possible for the Government Front Bench to assess all the amendments from across the House in different directions and tick off all those that the Government might now agree with, so that we do not waste parliamentary time on things on which there is general unanimity on the Government Front Bench, if not on their Back Benches?

As we continue to discuss the Bill, we should constantly bear in mind that the reason why there is concern about international conventions, the European Court of Human Rights and so on, is that this Parliament—the whole point of us being here—has to pass legislation it considers to be in the best interests of the people who live in this country and are of this country, the national interest being important. If the will of the people, as expressed in Parliament, cannot happen because of international conventions and human rights laws, as liberally interpreted by a plethora of lawyers, then it means that democracy is threatened. I therefore agree with the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, when he said we should look at some of this again. I hope the Government will look at it again and that we do not have to waste time on amendments that they will, broadly speaking, agree with.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)]

I am supporting the premise that a genuine asylum seeker should claim asylum when they get to a safe country.

Amendment 193, in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Davies, seeks to incorporate what I believe should be an entirely uncontroversial principle: if someone arrives in this country and needs sanctuary, they should say so, and without delay. This demand is the bare minimum of what a functioning immigration and asylum system should expect. I would argue that this amendment brings clarity and discipline to that expectation. It establishes a one-year window in which claims must be made and it ensures that claims brought beyond that point, without compelling reason, are not entertained.

I want to be very clear: that is a defence of genuine refugees. When our system is flooded with last-minute, opportunistic or tactical claims, it is those with genuine protection needs who suffer. Delays grow longer, the backlogs increase, and the resources stretch thinner. We owe it to those in real danger to ensure that the system works for them and not for those seeking to game it. The amendment is drawn from the new Canadian asylum and immigration rules, which also impose a one-year time limit for claiming asylum. The Home Secretary herself has acknowledged that this is an acute problem. As my noble friend Lord Davies said from this Dispatch Box yesterday, the Government have stated that they want to clamp down on students who come to the UK on a student visa and then claim asylum once they are in the UK, often at the end of their visa. The amendment would prevent that happening, since if a person came to the UK, studied for three years at university and then attempted to make an asylum claim, they would not be able to do so. I look forward to hearing what the Minister says in response.

Finally, Amendment 203E in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, would remove Albania, Georgia and India from the list of safe states in the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002. I urge the House to consider very carefully the implications of such a move, not only for the integrity of our asylum system but for our bilateral relations, our immigration enforcement systems and the principle of credible, evidence-based policy. Let us begin with Albania—

[Baroness Hamwee (LD)]

I am sorry, because the noble Lord was obviously about to go through the list. Perhaps he could add France, because I have been wondering about our relationship with France if we were to pursue the route of insisting that any safe country through which an asylum seeker travels should be aware that he pursues asylum.

[Lord Cameron of Lochiel (Con)]

I will continue to go through the list. Let us begin with Albania. The amendment proposes to strike from the list of safe countries a NATO member and a nation with which the United Kingdom has a formal bilateral returns agreement, signed in 2022, that has been a cornerstone of our efforts to tackle illegal migration and organised criminality. It allows for the swift return of Albanians who have no right to remain in the UK and ensures that genuine protection claims are still assessed on a case-by-case basis. According to Home Office statistics, a massive proportion of Albanian asylum claims by adult males are refused. Why? It is because Albania is, by any objective measure, a safe and functioning democracy, so much so that the Prime Minister visited Albania in May to hold talks about returning failed asylum seekers.

Georgia is a member of the Council of Europe, has EU candidate status, and co-operates with a range of international human rights mechanisms—