Examination of Witnesses (Questions 440
- 459)
TUESDAY 7 NOVEMBER 2000
RT HON
JACK STRAW,
MP, AND MR
STEPHEN BOYS
SMITH
440. The processes are much quicker but it boils
down to the same thing, everybody stays.
(Mr Straw) No, that is not the case. We are improving
enforcement against a background that the system was close to
collapse by April 1997.
Mr Howarth
441. Home Secretary, we have been three years
in a Labour Government now. I do not think you can blame everything
back on the Tories.
(Mr Straw) I do blame the Tories, particularly as
we are now lectured about the need to improve removals. I do agree
that we need to improve removals, but I say that the party which
was in Government for all those years and which collapsed the
system is in no position to lecture us about how it needs to be
improved.
Chairman
442. May we move on to the 1951 Convention?
I think it was in your Lisbon speech that you reminded people
that this is a Convention that is 50 years old and was borne out
of totally different circumstances, in a world which was far less
mobile and in many ways was more politically stable, although
there was a down side to that. Do you think it is possible now
to get agreement, perhaps, not so much on changes to the Convention
itself, but the way in which, for example it may be interpreted
across the European Union? Is the discussion going on among Ministers
at the EU about this, and is there some hope of the prospect of
achieving that?
(Mr Straw) Given the way in which UN Conventions are
drawn up and the way they are changed, I think it is unrealistic
to expect any quick progress on changing the terms of the Convention.
Also there is then the issue of how you would change those terms.
It seems to me that the basic criteria to give refugee status
to those who are in well-founded fear of persecution is satisfactory
and something to which every country which is signed up to human
rights should do. The question is how that obligation is interpreted,
Mr Chairman, as you say. On that we have not been helped as a
country by differing interpretations of some aspects of the 1951
Convention, not least in the issue of non-state persecution, but
there are aspects which do, the inter-relationship between the
1951 Convention obligations and those under the European Convention
on Human Rights. This is an area where I am convinced that we
would benefit by a greater degree of co-operation with our EU
partners and by there being a greater degree of commonality between
the approach which each EU partner adopts, because at the moment
I think you do get what has been called "asylum shopping",
where slightly different interpretation in different countries
leads to people being attracted to one country or another. You
then have problems under Dublin, which is not working effectively
and which is an error agreed by the previous administration in
1990, which has made it more difficult to return people to safe
third countries in Europe rather than less difficult. As you may
know, we have had a couple of court decisions where the courts
have held that for certain groups, France and Germany were not
safe third countries. We have sought to overcome those in part
by Section 11 of the 1999 Act, which has now come into force,
but it is a common standard, to use the cliche, "a level
playing field". It would be helpful and a lot of work is
now going on to that effect with the Commission and with other
Members of the JHA Council.
443. I think you have raised a problem in that
speech of the need, at present, for, say, somebody getting out
of Afghanistan and wishing to claim asylum in the United Kingdom,
having to get to the United Kingdom to claim that asylum, rather
than making that claim in the first safe country, which, for the
sake of administration, we will call Pakistan. Does that remain
your ambition?
(Mr Straw) Yes. It will be hard to achieve,
but I think we have to begin with the analysis. I was very struck
by the much more rational way in which Western Europe dealt with
humanitarian problems in Kosovo. Agreeing, first of all, that
there was a humanitarian problem because of huge political instability—civil
war—and then saying that most of the focus should be on
relief of those people on the border with Macedonia and that their
best interest was served by temporarily housing them just outside
the country and making arrangements, not least through military
power, to secure the safety of their areas and then it would be
a lot easier for them to go back, and, thirdly, accepting that
there would be some groups who did, because of their state of
health or other circumstances, need a respite from that kind of
terror and they should be accommodated in various European countries.
That is what we did in this country in the Humanitarian Evacuation
Programme and what happened in other European countries. There
has been a problem with that, which is that the criteria which
were used by different European countries varied. Germany, for
example, as part of the condition that they could go to Germany,
each of those who were going on their HEP voluntarily gave up
their right to apply for asylum, and they could not subsequently
apply for asylum in Germany unless the objective circumstances
in Kosovo had changed from the time when they left. The legal
advice to England, very strongly, was that if I had sought to
do that and some people subsequently made applications for asylum,
they would claim that they had given up their right to claim asylum
under duress, ie, on leaving the country. We need to sort that
out. That said, it must be more rational to have a situation where
the kind of approach that we adopted in Kosovo is more widely
used, but we query whether it could be used in Afghanistan. The
other thing that that would do is focus the attention of the developed
world on the need for there to be political solutions to these
areas of instability. In other words, we are dealing with the
push factors as well as the pull factors. It is pretty extraordinary
that we are, in Western Europe, America, Canada and Australia,
spending billions and billions of pounds dealing with the affects
of political instability in these countries, of civil war, and
far less on dealing with the causes of that instability.
444. We were told in Germany, Spain and, I think,
Hungary, that they had bilateral agreements with some of the countries
in which many of the asylum seekers/immigrants were coming. In
some cases they had made agreements that the numbers of immigrants
they would accept formally met the qualities that they were seeking,
and part of those arrangements were that they would then not entertain
applications for asylum. I must say that it surprised me that
they could do that, and partly for the reasons that you yourself
gave. Given that that is going on, do you think that lessons are
needed to get a common interpretation of the 1951 Convention,
or can those two things go side by side?
(Mr Straw) I think they go side by side. Any country
which is signatory to the 1951 Convention has to entertain applications
for asylum. There were special circumstances around the equivalent
of the HEP Programme in Germany and although they found it easier
to require the people on their programme to go back to Kosovo,
that is against the background in which they have hundreds of
thousands of people settle in Germany compared to those who settle
in the United Kingdom. I think that a common interpretation and
common procedures where these made things easier—not where
they made things more difficult—would make life much more
sensible within the EU and, in time, would help overcome some
of the problems of the Dublin Convention, which is the subject
of review by the EU at the moment.
445. One of the questions we came away with,
Home Secretary, was that other EU countries, Spain and Germany,
for example, have these arrangements where they immediately return
those who they regard as illegal arrivals, which raises the question
of why we are not similarly able to do that with those on the
same footing coming from France?
(Mr Straw) We used to be able to do that.
446. Is this Dublin?
(Mr Straw) Yes. We used to be able to do that under
a gentleman's agreement which was in existence, and that gentleman's
agreement still exists in respect of immigration—people
who have been refused leave on an immigration basis and who do
not claim asylum. Although it was not perfect, it worked pretty
well. The extraordinary thing is that Dublin, which was signed
up to by the previous administration in 1990, came into force
in October 1997 and as night follows day, sadly, led to the abolition
of that gentleman's agreement, and it has made matters worse.
That is where we are. I have looked at whether we can re-establish
that gentleman's agreement by doing other things, but if you see
it from France's point of view, they say, "Well, the United
Kingdom agreed Dublin, we have all signed up to it, we have all
ratified it."
447. So did Germany and Spain presumably?
(Mr Straw) There is a bilateral agreement between
Germany and Denmark by which people are returned across the border,
but it is infinitely easier to do that at a border crossing than
it is across the Channel.
448. Spain do it with people coming from North
Africa.
(Mr Straw) They do and they do not. Spain has hundreds
of thousands of people who are wholly illegal within Spain. There
was an amnesty granted last year in which 500,000, not asylum
seekers, but wholly illegals from North Africa, were given residence,
and in turn that is a very successful pull factor. One of the
truths about Southern Europe is that they have fewer people who
make applications for asylum for all sorts of cultural and administrative
reasons, but they have hundreds of thousands more people who have
no papers at all and who are not known to the authorities. That
is also true in France. France has fewer asylum seekers per head
of population than the United Kingdom does, but in Southern France
the agri businesses would scarcely operate without people
who come across from North Africa, sans papiers, as they
are known, and they work on the margins. I told you about Spain,
and although it is true that there are good bilateral arrangements
between Spain and Morocco, Spain has huge difficulties in getting
removals to any part of North West Africa. So life is not always
as it appears.
449. We were told by the Spanish Immigration
Minister, a few weeks before Barbara Roach made that speech on
the background of all of these problems, that they had a need
for 200,000 immigrants to do the jobs that the Spaniards did not
want to do, particularly in construction and agriculture.
(Mr Straw) That is despite the fact that Spanish unemployment
is one of the highest in Europe.
Mr Howarth
450. Can I take the Home Secretary back to the
1951 Convention? Can I invite the Home Secretary to agree that
circumstances have changed pretty substantially since 1951 when
this Convention was drawn up? At that time there were few international
air services, international travel was restricted to very few
people and the circumstances today, of course, are wholly different,
where we have hundreds of flights just across the Atlantic every
day. The most recent figures that I have are for last year, which
show that nearly 9,500 people were either recognised initially
as being refugees and being granted asylum, or were not recognised
as refugees but given extended leave to remain. Can I put to you,
Home Secretary, that given the ease with which people can travel
today, the 1951 Convention is simply out of date, because is not
the corollary of those obligations we entered into in 1951 that
wherever there is conflict around the world and wherever people
are being persecuted—and many of the countries which Britain
ruled so successfully, the successive governments are persecuting
their own people—we must, therefore, accept an obligation
to house those people in the United Kingdom.
(Mr Straw) If there is instability anywhere in the
world?
451. Yes?
(Mr Straw) No. I do not accept that and neither does
the Convention lay that down. If you are saying to me should we
abandon the 1951 Convention and the practical and moral obligation
that it imposes on Member States in isolation, my answer to that
is no.
452. I am inviting you to review the position
given it is now so out of date.
(Mr Straw) Circumstances have changed since 1951,
there is no question about that, for reasons you have described
and, above all, because of the end of the Cold War and the collapse
of the Soviet Bloc. Up until literally the Berlin Wall came down
asylum applications to this country were running at about 4,000
a year, there was a backwater in the Immigration and Nationality
Directorate. Most were accepted, most were from Eastern Europe
and they were political refugees from the Soviet Union or its
satellites.
453. All the figures you gave us just now were
nothing to do with the Soviet Union.
(Mr Straw) Some of them are.
454. Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iran, Sri Lanka.
(Mr Straw) They are to do with the Soviet Union. What
was going on before the collapse of the Berlin Wall was that each
bloc, the NATO/US bloc and the Soviet Union, and to some extent
China, had a hegemony over certain client states in Asia and Africa
and there was a kind of stand-off in each of those countries so
it led to the appearance of stability in many of those countries.
Now, you could argue, and I would certainly do so, that system
was leading to huge pent up forces which spilt out in the wake
of the collapse of the Berlin Wall and created that instability,
but if you look at many of the countries where there has been
subsequently significant turmoil, Afghanistan is the best one,
that is the best example, but there are many others—
455. Sri Lanka, China, Somalia?
(Mr Straw) I am not suggesting all of them but in
many of them it has flowed as a consequence of the instability
which followed after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, just as,
if I may say, a good deal of migration from Eastern European itself
as those economies went into free fall. Can I just make a wider
point about the 1951 Convention? The 1951 Convention does not
only apply to Western Europe and the more profitable states, it
also applies to any Member, a signatory of the United Nations.
The greatest burden of supporting refugees falls on the developing
world, it falls on the states contiguous to Rwanda, for example,
it has fallen over many years on India who have taken the equivalent
of refugees and economic migrants by the hundreds of thousands
across the border from Bangladesh to West Bengal and which in
turn, let me say, has contributed to political instability, particularly
in the North Eastern States of India. There are many other examples
as well. Countries like India and countries contiguous to Rwanda
have to an extraordinary degree actually accepted their obligation,
they are not just sending people back at the point of a gun. They
may not have provided them with the degree of wealth and support
they are provided with in Western Europe and Australia and Canada
but they have accepted those obligations. If we in the West suddenly
tear up a Convention then I do not think it would be much of a
message to the countries which have taken the biggest burden over
the years.
456. Surely the point is they have tribal associations
across their boundaries which many people argue are artificial
anyway. Although I take your point, surely it would be natural
to expect them to do that, just as it would be natural for us
to accept Jewish refugees from Germany or perhaps Huguenots from
France, it would not necessarily be natural for us to accept the
rise in refugees in the same way.
(Mr Straw) Sometimes the tribal associations lead
to a lack of apparent welcome rather than the reverse, we need
to be clear about that. Yes, of course, it was we who divided
East Bengal and West Bengal, the British Government.
457. A Labour Government.
(Mr Straw) Well, there is a history to it if you want
to know. It was done twice and I think it was in the earlier part
of the last century it was done as well. Leaving that aside, the
fact of the matter is that some of the people in Bangladesh of
course have associations, ethnic and religious associations, with
the muslims in West Bengal, some of them do not, but it is still
a very substantial pressure on those countries. It is something
we need to bear in mind in weighing the balance of this issue.
458. I do not want to prolong this but I am
keen to try to develop with the Home Secretary this idea that
he did express in Lisbon concern about the Convention.
(Mr Straw) Of course.
459. There is provision for us to renounce it
and I do not think there is any question anybody wants to do that
because obviously we are all concerned about those who are the
victims of oppression. I am not clear that the Government is clear
that the consequences of accepting the application of a 1951 Convention
to year 2000 circumstances will not lead to substantial further
justifiable, in terms of the Convention, claims to residency in
the United Kingdom and the obligation on the British people further
to accept substantial numbers of people with all the consequences
that flow from that.
(Mr Straw) I think I am pretty clear about what needs
to be done, and I have to say, modestly, that I think the United
Kingdom is clearer about the changes that need to be made than
many other Member States in the EU, indeed they welcomed the contribution
that was made by way of the Lisbon speech. What I called for,
as you will be aware, is a more rational approach which involved
the categorisation of groups of people and countries of origin,
an EU settlement programme, the possibility which the Chairman
made of applications lodged overseas, and actions by the regions
of origin to reduce migration pressures. I think these are sensible
proposals we need to look at. Each has a downside for sure but
we need to examine them. Certainly I think the categorisation
of countries would be extremely helpful into countries which are
completely safe, those where it is accepted, on a stricter basis
than UNHCR finds at the moment, that there are problems, and those
that are the intermediate category where the default setting would
be people's applications fall to be refused but, of course, there
could always be one or two individuals who may be able to make
a claim to prove it.
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