Illegal Migration Bill — 11 Jul 2023 at 16:45

“necessary to safeguard and promote the welfare of the child.”

“We will continue to grant asylum and support to refugees fleeing persecution, with the ultimate aim of helping them to return home if it is safe to do so.”

“A period of detention can have a significant and negative impact on a child’s mental or physical health and development”.

“I wish to emphasise that we will always act in accordance with our international obligations, and to be very clear that unaccompanied asylum-seeking children will not be subject to inadmissibility or transferred for offshore processing.”-[Official Report, 7 December 2021; Vol. 705, c. 311.]

“A person exercising any of those functions must, in exercising the function, have regard to any guidance given to the person by the Secretary of State”

“The Home Office has still not been able to provide me with vital information I have requested about the safeguarding of children in their accommodation. I am therefore unclear about how they can make informed assessments about the impact of the Home Office accommodating children without having this data.”

“An unaccompanied child may be detained under paragraph 16(2) in a short-term holding facility for a maximum period of 24 hours”.

“is designed purely to place a duty on the Government to do what they say they intend to do anyway-introduce safe and legal routes”.-[Official Report, House of Lords, 5 July 2023; Vol. 831, c. 1248.]

“The Illegal Migration Bill risks people being left in or consigned to exploitation. They will be fearful of seeking help, because the traffickers will use this legislation to control them further, and they won’t trust the authorities…I believe if the Illegal Migration Bill is enacted as it is currently proposed, it will leave more people in slavery unwilling to come forward to UK authorities.”

“These victims will be incentivised to avoid seeking support and help, out of fear of deportation.”

“It is cruel and simply unworkable to have looked-after children spending their formative years in the UK without the Government even considering their protection needs.”

“I have not sought further evidence that detention has an incontrovertibly deleterious effect on the health of pregnant women and their unborn children. I take this to be a statement of the obvious.”

“since January, no pregnant migrant women have arrived in this country illegally.”-[Official Report, House of Lords, 3 July 2023; Vol. 831, c. 1011.]

“the restrictions placed on pregnant women’s detention since 2016 has not had an ‘incentivising’ effect for women claiming asylum in the UK.”

“There is incontrovertible evidence that pregnant asylum seekers have poor pregnancy and neonatal outcomes and complicated pregnancies with increased morbidity and mortality… The detention of pregnant asylum seekers increases the likelihood of stress, which can risk the health of the unborn baby.”

“This objective is frustrated if deportees are able to hold up their removal for years while their challenge goes through potentially three tiers of appeal followed by a petition to Strasbourg. The process commonly takes years.”

“interim measures are available in cases like this, it is probable that no legislative scheme for the prompt removal of illegal immigrants”-

“At the moment the system is virtually unworkable. People can bring a judicial review during the process of the initial appeal, and when they reach the right to appeal to the tribunal they can judicially review the tribunal for not allowing the appeal to the tribunal. They can then judicially review the tribunal’s decision and they can judicially review whether they are entitled to go to the court of appeal following failure at the tribunal. The whole system is riddled with delay, prevarication, and, in some cases, deliberate disruption of the appeals process. Then they can judicially review the decision on removal even when the appeals have been gone through.”-[Official Report, 24 April 2002; Vol. 384, c. 355.]

“No doubt the Bill can be improved in various ways, but we must recognise that almost every amendment we make to soften it can tend only to weaken its essential objectives: stopping the boats… We really must…give the Government the opportunity by this Bill finally to confront this most intractable of problems.”-[Official Report, House of Lords, 10 May 2023; Vol. 829, c. 1806.]

“If only one in twenty of the people of that region migrated by mid-century-surely a conservative estimate-there would be 140 million people on the move.”

“If we do something today…the law applying to it should be the law in force today, not tomorrow’s backward adjustment of it.”

Debate in Parliament |