Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Lord Hoffmann Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 14th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the expert contribution of the noble Lord, Lord McDonald. I offer Green support for all the amendments in this group. I particularly highlight and commend the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and her allies for highlighting something that is crucial, but I feel that has been covered powerfully, so I will simply address most of the other amendments in this group.

It is worth stressing that the amendments would remove the legal fiction that Rwanda must be treated conclusively as safe by the courts and other decision-makers. They would allow the consideration of evidence. I am speaking in the midst of many eminent lawyers, so I will focus on the politics of this. We live in a world in which we are often told we are living with post-truth politics. At the weekend, I was in the constituency of Kingswood knocking on doors. I met some people there who were living in a post-truth environment—people who had disappeared down some very dark conspiracy rabbit holes. When you are knocking on doors, of course it is impossible to attempt to extract people from those rabbit holes in the couple of minutes you have, but it is truly terrifying—I have to say that most of them will be voting for the Reform party on Thursday, which is something the Government should have great concern about for all kinds of reasons.

Post-truth politics is one thing, but what we confront with the Rwanda Bill is post-truth law. The noble Lord, Lord Clarke, said—I wrote down his words—that he was

“completely flabbergasted by the constitutional implications”.

What are the constitutional implications of post-truth law? Nothing is weighed on the reality of the world.

I want to pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Deben, about the duties of this House. Surely it is the duty of this House to ensure that we have truth- based law.

[Lord Hoffmann (CB)]

My Lords, my noble friend Lord Clarke asked whether there was any precedent for the kind of legislation we are considering, in which some question of fact is declared to be the case to the exclusion of any contrary decision by a court. There are such precedents, but you have to go a long way back in our history to find them.

In 1531, there was an unfortunate incident at a dinner party given by the Bishop of Rochester. All the people who ate their dinner became sick, and one of them died. This was not, at the time, put down to the inadequacy of the health and safety laws in the 16th century, but suspicion fell upon the cook. The King had a horror of poisoning. He was more or less a contemporary of Lucrezia Borgia and recognised that it was being used as a political weapon all over the country. He came down to Parliament, to your Lordships’ House, and promoted a Bill that became an Act. It declared, first, that poisoning was a form of treason; secondly, that the penalty for it was to be boiled alive; and, thirdly—this is the point—that the cook had been guilty of this crime and no trial was to take place. They were probably concerned that some lefty lawyers might get the cook off if it went to trial. The result was that the cook was duly boiled alive before an appreciative audience at Smithfield. That is the sort of precedent which one has to look at in order to justify what is being done now.

Since then, for centuries, we have had the development of the principles of the rule of law and the separation of powers—principles which English constitutional lawyers have written about with pride and foreign lawyers have written about with admiration. I suggest to your Lordships that that is where we ought to stay.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps it is only the House of Lords that when asked to find a precedent can refer back to 1531. I say to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hoffman, that I was aware of that issue, because I have seen the Act. It was on display in the National Archives in its exhibition on treason last year. I think the Minister has also seen it. It was also noted that it was repealed quite shortly afterwards.

[Lord Hoffmann (CB)]

Once the cook was dead.

[Lord Purvis of Tweed (LD)]

The Government are asking us to be the perpetual judge of the legislation and actions of another country. That puts the legislature in an unusual position. In fact, it puts it into a unique position, specifically for this country. I am not a judge on Rwandan legislation, policy or actions. I have been to Rwanda; I respect it greatly and I thoroughly enjoyed my visit. I have been massively impressed with the development of Rwanda that is in their hands.

The noble Baroness, Lady D’Souza, referred to the eloquent points made by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and the noble Lords, Lord McDonald and Lord Cashman, with regard to torture. She told us that if we wanted to be a judge, we should speak to Victoire Ingabire, an opposition leader who is currently under house arrest. I have. I have been in her house, and I have asked her that question. Subsequent to my meeting the opposition member, officials of the Rwanda Government asked the hotel that I was staying at to inform on me. I am not a judge as to whether that means that Rwanda is a safe country. That is one example—I think, a bad example. It is probably an illustrative example. However, I am not a judge on that—our courts are. That is why we have them here.

We are asked not just to pass a “Rwanda is safe” Bill but to pass—

Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill

Lord Hoffmann Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 19th February 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)]

I say, gently, to the noble Baroness that this issue with unrestricted, unprecedented levels of geopolitical change and immigration is sui generis. Therefore, one has to see it through that prism. Yes, broadly and in principle, it is better to negotiate than to withdraw from a convention or another legal regime. But you cannot always use the case that, because Putin has been beastly, we self-evidently and axiomatically have to deal with his breach of international law. After all, invading a sovereign country such as Ukraine is a bit different from some of the other cases the noble Baroness used. It does not mean that you cannot be critical of the overall application of the legal regime we are discussing.

In fairness, my noble friend Lord Hailsham’s amendment is very fair-minded, enabling the Government potentially to present the evidence that, hitherto, they were not able to do in the 2022 case. Indeed, the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Coker, is eminently sensible—actually, it is rather otiose, because one would always assume that the Home Secretary would seek the advice of the Attorney-General in proceeding in these small number of cases.

Two of the amendments the noble Baroness put forward are clearly wrecking amendments. The amendment that would disapply Section 55 of the Illegal Migration Act would specifically remove the express parliamentary sanction and authorisation of non-compliance with the interim measure, which, in itself, is a draconian move. Amendments 58 and 60 go to the heart of what we assume to be international law, in terms of what is justiciable in domestic law.

Let us be honest and put our cards on the table. This is about tying up the Bill in endless judicial reviews to stop any people being removed and to stop us tackling one of the biggest, endemic, troubling issues in politics. It is about bringing this back under the purview of domestic legislation in order to establish a roadblock via judicial review.

My final point is about the Human Rights Act 1998. It does not give legal effect in domestic legislation to the Strasbourg court’s Rule 39 practice, which is grounded in Article 34 of the European Convention on Human Rights and is not one of the Commission rights set out in Schedule 1 to the 1998 Act. For those reasons, therefore, there is a very big question mark over the use of Rule 39 interim measures. Are they really international law as we would define it? Noble Lords would be wise to consider that when they come to vote for these amendments.

[Lord Hoffmann (CB)]

The noble Lord, Lord Howard, did me the honour of quoting a passage which I had written in a foreword to the paper by Professor Ekins of St John’s College, Oxford, on the jurisdiction to grant interim injunctions. I adhere to what I said in that foreword, but I ought to go a bit further. I will not go into the reasons Professor Ekins gave. He looked into the terms of the treaty, the travaux préparatoires and what the court had been saying until relatively recently, and he came to the conclusion that it had simply invented the power to grant interim injunctions. Indeed, the court in Strasbourg does not even have the power to grant final injunctions. If it is determined that there has been a breach of the treaty, what is to be done about it is a matter for the Committee of Ministers and not for the court itself.

However, the power to grant an interim injunction is an important part of the armoury of any court. Anyone who has held judicial office will know that it usually involves not so much any question of law but a practical question of deciding what lawyers perhaps rather frivolously call the balance of convenience between facts, which means the power to balance the possibility of injustice in one direction or the other. That is to say, you say to yourself, “Well, what is the position? Assuming that he turns out to be right but I don’t stop this going ahead, what injustice will he have suffered; and likewise, if I do stop it, what injustice will have been suffered by the person who has been stopped?” You weigh these things against each other and come to a practical conclusion.

It seems to me that it was sensible for the original treaty not to have included a power to grant interim injunctions, because this is essentially a practical and local matter which ought to be considered by English courts—by the courts of this country—and particularly not by a court in Strasbourg, whose sole function is to say what the terms of the convention mean. What the convention means is what it says it means, and that is perfectly well understood. However, the power to grant injunctions seems really to be a question for local courts.

If we go ahead with Clause 5, we have the bizarre situation in which the courts are, by virtue of the other clauses we discussed earlier, prevented from themselves granting interim injunctions. For the reasons I have given, I wholly supported the amendments proposed earlier today by the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, and my noble and learned friend Lady Hale. They seem absolutely essential to enable our courts to give justice.

On the other hand, however, what we have is a provision by which the orders of a court which, in my view, does not have jurisdiction can nevertheless be enforced, provided that the Minister—like the Emperor at the Colosseum—puts his thumb up rather than his thumb down in relation to those particular orders. That seems an extremely strange situation. For that reason, I am unwilling to support the amendment that gives effect to the interim injunctions in our report, but I certainly supported the amendments that were moved earlier.

[The Lord Bishop of Chichester]

My Lords, I rise to speak briefly to Amendments 58, 60 and 61, to which my most reverend friend the Archbishop of Canterbury has put his name. I am very glad to be in support of the work of the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, on these amendments.

We come, of course, to the question of the place of the European Court of Human Rights. I am very grateful for the comments that have been made about that, particularly from the noble Lords, Lord Scriven and Lord Hannay, about it not being a foreign court but an international court. Earlier today, we heard from the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Hale, about the relationship that we have with the European Court of Human Rights—a relationship where we learn from the wisdom of international friends; where we bring our own wisdom and shape each other’s thinking and practice. It is a relationship of mutual respect for justice and for each other. These seem to me to be very important qualities as we look at the international situation of a very divided world today.

My most reverend friend the Archbishop of Canterbury referred in his speech at Second Reading to the danger of a “pick and choose” approach to international law, which threatens to undermine our global standing and the principle of universality. I agree. It is profoundly disturbing when, on the face of this Bill, we do not find assurance of compliance with European and UN approaches to human rights or an adequate mechanism for addressing our own processes of law and the risk of serious harm. This is about principles, values and rules to which we should aspire as the foundation of human dignity in an enlightened and humane society.

In the scriptures honoured by Jewish and Christian people alike, the prophet Isaiah speaks of one who will,

“proclaim justice to the nations”.

With this Bill, do we run the risk that countries less wedded to the rule of law and justice, seeing us as an example to follow, will do so for all the wrong and tragic reasons?