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5.39 pm
Mr. Charles Wardle (Bexhill and Battle): I share the feelings of the hon. Member for Walsall, North (Mr. Winnick) when he condemns terrorism and I am sure that right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House do as well.
The Bill is necessary and it will have the support of the whole House, as my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) has already said. Until last year, the advisory panel operating under rules that flow from the Immigration Act 1971 was able to review orders to deport or exclude foreign nationals considered a threat to national security, but the Home Secretary had the final say. The Bill makes the decisions of the new statutory commission binding on the Home Secretary, in order to satisfy the European Court of Human Rights.
Anyone who followed the chain of events in the case of Karamjit Singh Chahal, from the deportation order served on him, through refusal of his asylum application and the advisory panel's review, to his application to the European Court of Human Rights and the court's judgment a year ago, will regard the Bill as an inevitable consequence of those events.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere said, the Bill was already in preparation before the general election. Since the European Court of Human Rights found that our domestic courts were not in a position to treat with the national security aspects of cases involving terrorists and, at the same time, ruled that people facing deportation on security grounds must be allowed some means of challenging the Home Secretary's decision, a Bill giving statutory authority to new procedures was needed.
Without the Bill, it could be argued that the Government's ability to remove or bar a terrorist or other person who was a security risk might well be stymied simply by the individual's staving off the order by showing the Government's failure to meet their obligations under the convention. That conjures up an appalling prospect of known foreign terrorists at work in Britain being able to prolong their activities here and to cock a snook at the police and the Security Service by using the ironic argument that we were not treating them--in this haven of freedoms known as the United Kingdom--with internationally recognised standards of fairness.
The Bill is short. It has already been given careful and expert consideration in another place so a great deal of further clarification may not be required on Second Reading. It is important, if only for the avoidance of future doubt, that the Bill satisfies the European Court of Human Rights' unequivocal commitment to article 3 of the convention on torture or inhumane, cruel and degrading treatment, and that has been achieved.
It also helps that the Bill now clarifies the binding nature of the commission's decisions on the Home Secretary, as the Minister pointed out. Any lingering ambiguity on that score which left the European Court of Human Rights in any doubt about the new commission's ability to fulfil the spirit and purpose of articles 5 and 13 of the convention might render the legislation ineffective. Equally, it was sensible to include in the Bill the requirement that a person to be removed or barred on grounds of national security must be given notice of the right to appeal. Again, the Minister has highlighted that.
No matter how offensive it may seem to some observers that Parliament appears to be bending over backwards to be fair to terrorists, our system of justice will be all the stronger for allowing such terrorists a swift but fair appeal, independent of the Home Secretary of the day, against the charge that they are a risk to our national security.
I hope that the Minister will be able to enlarge on two aspects of the Bill in his reply to the debate. The first is the use of a special advocate to be appointed by the Attorney-General to speak up for the appellant on security evidence at a stage in the proceedings when both the appellant and the appellant's counsel will have been excluded from the hearing. The Government say that there will be no client relationship between the appellant and the special advocate yet somehow the appellant, his lawyers and the watching world, not to say the European Court of Human Rights, will be asked to accept that the advocate is fearlessly fighting the corner of the terrorist, who is not his client in any case. It is all very British. I understand and fully accept the security constraints, but I want to believe that it will work.
Can the Minister assure me that nothing in those arrangements will allow doubt to be cast on the proceedings in a way that could discredit the new commission in the eyes of the European Court of Human Rights, without the approval of which we shall be back to square one in the removal of terrorists?
My second concern is about the right under article 8 of the convention of a person refused entry clearance on the ground that leave to enter would not be conducive to the public good to appeal to the commission. The need to show exemplary fairness to a terrorist who would be a risk to public safety if he was given leave to enter, but who says that he wants to be reunited with his family in this country, will seem rather far fetched even to the most fair-minded of people. However, if that is what is needed on the statute book to prevent the European Court of Human Rights from overruling the Home Secretary's exclusion orders, I accept that it is sensible to include it in the Bill.
My concern is that the provision will set a hare running over article 8 of the convention in other broader and less controversial areas of immigration control. Let us take the example of a person who is not even remotely a security risk and is therefore not subject to the Bill, but who has for whatever other reason been refused entry clearance, say over an application for a visit visa to see part of his family resident in the United Kingdom. If the entry clearance officer has done a conscientious job and, under the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993, the scope exists for a swift internal review of the refusal by the senior entry clearance officer in post, to my thinking that individual rightly has no further right of appeal against that refusal.
Once the Bill is passed, the disappointed visitor, whose only vice seems to be that he would probably be tempted to overstay, will see that even known terrorists, who could quickly threaten the British public and be the cause of chaos and mayhem, have the statutory right to appeal against refusal of entry clearance. Every rejected visa applicant will shout, "Where's the justice in that?" Is not clause 2(2) likely to be the thin end of the wedge for British immigration control and the pressures that will be imposed by article 8 of the convention, especially when legislation is introduced in the House to incorporate the convention into British law? I hope that the Minister will be able to show me that my fears are unfounded and that this is not the thin end of the wedge.
There was some mirth in another place about the limited financial provisions of the Bill, which have been changed to some extent. I do not intend to challenge the money resolution, but it is clear how painfully aware the Home Office has become of the costs of immigration control, as I repeatedly predicted would be the case when I was a Minister there and at every opportunity that I have had since then to do so. I hope that it will be in order to say to the Minister that the best way to limit expenditure in the long term and to reinforce immigration controls is to spend an admittedly large sum now--I said this to the previous Government--on processing the backlog of asylum applications as swiftly as possible. That will not only assist the genuine refugees languishing in the queue but, by getting rid of the queue, will destroy the very thing that attracts the bogus applicant--the ability to join the queue and wait here perfectly legally with the benefit of social security for up to four years before his case is heard. If the Minister can persuade the Treasury to spend a lot of money now to save vastly more every year once the queue has gone, he will achieve fundamentally important progress in immigration control, to the benefit of the whole country.
If the Minister also signals that he will consistently use the available fast-track mechanism for manifestly unfounded asylum applications such as those of the Czech and Slovak gipsies at Dover, who have travelled through another safe country where asylum could reasonably have been claimed before reaching the United Kingdom, he will have the force of the Geneva convention on his side and nothing in the Dublin convention will seriously prevent him.
Fiona Mactaggart (Slough):
I am pleased that the Bill is before us today. It has reminded me how old I am. I recall the time in the early 1970s when I heard a speech by Mark Hosenball, a journalist who had been excluded on national security grounds by a Labour Home Secretary for writing an article about Government communications headquarters. The then Home Secretary's decision was about as silly as that of his Conservative successor, who
At the time, Members of Parliament were very concerned about the procedure Mr. Hosenball faced. He was not allowed to know whether his article or something else was leading to the decision to expel him. The panel of three wise men heard the case in his absence; he was allowed to know nothing of the case against him. Although my hon. Friend the Minister said that the issue had not divided the parties, the procedure has--on that occasion and since--made some Labour Members deeply uneasy.
Let us be honest: wrong decisions have been made. For example, it was shown that in some of the Iraqi cases the information held by the national security services was inaccurate. Following that, according to the procedure, the decisions were overturned.
We needed a better procedure, and I think that we have it here. I praise my hon. Friend the Minister, and our friends in the other place, for the quality of this law. They have listened to representations made on the original draft; the rules of procedure have been published in draft, which is very helpful. We can now feel confident that there is a proper way of hearing such cases. That is not only because we had a setback in the European Court of Human Rights, but because the best way in which to defeat terrorism is to defeat it by means of a transparent and fair procedure. We do not need to use mechanisms that require a short circuit of the rules. Of course, in some circumstances those who are before a tribunal will not know the full case against them, because that could endanger national security. I am glad that the special advocate has been put in place to take care of them.
I want to refer to some of the points made by my hon. Friend the Member for Bexhill and Battle (Mr. Wardle)--[Hon. Members: "He is not your hon. Friend."] I am sorry; the hon. Member for Bexhill and Battle. We have quite different views on the subject but, surprisingly, he often talks good sense. He just did so, and I associate myself with the point that he made to my hon. Friend the Minister about the benefits of spending substantial sums now to process the backlog with which his party left us, so as to speed up the process and create a transparent and straightforward way of dealing with cases.
I want to answer the hon. Gentleman's concern about article 8. It does not entitle anyone to exercise the right to family life in the United Kingdom. Many years ago, I was associated with a series of cases that went to the European Court of Human Rights involving women whose foreign husbands were not allowed to join them here under the immigration rules at that time. We won those cases only because there was sex discrimination in relation to the exercise of article 8 on family life issues. There is no independent entitlement to exercise the right to family life in a particular country--although there is a right to family life.
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