The Asylum Bill

35 Labour MPs voted against the Government on an amendment to the key clause in the Asylum Bill, which takes away judicial supervision of asylum appeals, and abolishes the Immigration Appeals Tribunal (IAT). The IAT currently provides a layer of appeal above the adjudicators. At the time I felt quite pleased that we had managed to get 35 votes, but in retrospect it seems a relatively feeble effort.

On the issue of tuition fees, an important political decision, the Government's majority was reduced to just 5, despite the most strenuous efforts by Labour whips. Yet on a Bill which is unprecedented in removing a tribunal from any oversight by the courts, which has been severely criticised by senior judges, by 3 Select Committees in Parliament, and by a huge range of human rights organisations and other NGOs we managed to muster just 35 Labour votes, plus the Lib Dems and Nationalist MPs.

The Government argument for removing the right to challenge an appeal decision, even on a point of law, is based on dubious statistics, and claims that people use the system to delay removal from the UK. Not once have they put forward any case to argue the principle of  why such a fundamental right in our legal system should be discarded.

They play, not a numbers game, but a percentage game. Only between 3% and 4% of decisions by asylum adjudicators are overturned by the IAT or the courts, they say. This figure is obtained by expressing the successes as a percentage of ALL cases heard by adjudicators. It is a spurious calculation. Over 20% of all cases heard by adjudicators are decided in favour of the asylum seeker, so none of those would ever be considered at a higher level, except for those the Home Office themselves appeal. Turn that percentage into a number, and it is over 2000 cases a year, cases that if a wrong decision is made could result in someone being sent back to imprisonment, torture, or death.

During the debates on the Bill I moved an amendment to repeal Section 55 of the 2002 Act, the section which means that asylum seekers can be denied all support if the Home Office decides that they did not make their claim as soon as they could have done. Astonishingly a letter has been issued from the Home Office which says that unaccompanied asylum seeker children who still have claims undecided will have to face a Section 55 interview when they become 18, as will any asylum seeker family with their youngest child reaching 18. Even this did not provoke much reaction. Again there were criticisms by the Home Affairs Select Committee of the operation of Section 55, and their recommendation that it should be independently reviewed to decide whether it should be kept in place.

So where do we go now? Yet again we have to hope that the Lords will make the human rights case, and throw out the appeals changes. We must keep the campaign going to repeal Section 55, and at the very least get the review the Select Committee asked for. Above all we have to keep up efforts to get across just what seeking asylum means. Bob Marshall Andrews, one of the Labour rebels, made the telling point that no Government would have dared to take away legal rights in this way from people who were British. He is probably right, but I wouldn't be too sure that if this change goes through other tribunal systems could be in the firing line for similar treatment in the not too distant future.

March 2004

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