If it’s wrong to overturn the courts on Rwanda, it’s wrong to overturn Post Office convictions. Blockers in the Lords can’t have it both ways

LET no one doubt the passion and sincerity with which the Archbishop of Canterbury is fighting the Government’s plans to send to Rwanda those ‘boat people’ risking their lives to escape the horrors of . . . northern France.

He has described the policy as ‘ungodly’, and told the House of Lords last week: ‘In the Christian tradition we are told to welcome the stranger. Jesus said: “I was a stranger and you invited me in.” ’

Now, as the Mail revealed on Thursday, The Most Rev Justin Welby has, along with two of his colleagues in the Lords, Baroness [Shami] Chakrabarti — nominated for a peerage by Jeremy Corbyn — and the former president of the Supreme Court, Baroness [Brenda] Hale, produced a series of amendments designed to thwart the Rwanda plan.

In essence, they propose that none of it should pass into law, unless the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) ‘has advised . . . that the Republic of Rwanda is a safe place for the processing of asylum and other humanitarian protection claims’.

The point is that when the Supreme Court last year declared the Rwanda scheme to be in breach of our legal obligations, it relied heavily on evidence from the UNHCR, which was quoted 65 times in the judgment. Specifically, the UNHCR had referred the Supreme Court to many cases of Rwanda expelling asylum seekers it had previously taken in and criticised the country’s ‘poor human rights record’.

So, giving the UNHCR a veto over the British Government’s plan to deter folk (young men in the vast majority) from paying large sums of money to people smugglers would kill off the Rwanda scheme once and for all.

Which is the obvious purpose of the Welby/ Chakrabarti/Hale amendments.

Hypocrisy

Yet this is all based on stunning hypocrisy. For the UNHCR has itself frequently hailed the Rwandan government for its enlightenment and social responsibility in taking in hundreds of thousands of refugees.

In 2021, the High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, praised the eastcentral African country for its offer of a ‘safe haven’ for refugees from Libya.

‘I really want to particularly thank the Government of Rwanda . . . for continued solidarity and generosity, giving hope to vulnerable asylum seekers and refugees in dire need of protection and safety,’ he said.

And the same UNHCR press release effusively quotes the way it had been thanked by a migrant family from Somalia, a beneficiary of the scheme Mr Grandi’s team had negotiated with the Rwandan government: ‘We were worried about being in detention and never having freedom. I had heard that Rwanda was a safe place and they were welcoming refugees.’

Yet another recent UNHCR document enthuses: ‘UNHCR Rwanda works to ensure that all refugees have access to life- saving and essential healthcare, reproductive health care, HIV prevention and treatment, and nutritional well-being. The government of Rwanda has generously adopted a policy of inclusion of refugees into the national health system.’ Presumably, this is one of the reasons why our own Divisional court had originally approved the Government’s Rwanda scheme.

Anyway, after the Supreme Court found against it, the Government negotiated a treaty with Rwanda, specifically designed to address the claim it might in future expel some of those arriving from the UK to countries where they would be at risk. Article 10 of that Treaty declares: ‘No relocated individual . . . shall be removed from Rwanda except to the United Kingdom.’

It is on this basis that the ‘Safety of Rwanda Bill’ — which passed the Commons — can properly claim to be addressing the concerns of the Supreme Court. And when its opponents in the Lords say the Bill is ‘breaching the rule of law by declaring Rwanda safe when the highest court in the land has found otherwise’, they are wilfully ignoring this treaty, which itself is a document under international law.

A similar argument had been put in the Commons, notably by Labour’s Shadow Immigration Minister, Stephen Kinnock: ‘The Rwanda Bill is an assault on the rule of law and an affront to the separation of powers. These principles are cornerstones of our liberal democracy.’

Kinnock was in effect arguing that Parliament should never overturn the verdict of a court. He was banjaxed by the Conservative MP Richard Graham, who asked: ‘Just to tease out a little more Labour policy on the specific issue that the honourable gentleman referred to, is he ruling out any consideration of this House determining to overturn the wrongful conviction of hundreds of subpostmasters simply because that would set a precedent in the relationship between this House and the Courts?’

Completely stumped — not least because Labour has fallen in with the Government’s Bill to overturn judicial verdicts in these hundreds of cases — Kinnock blethered: ‘Well, that is an interesting one; I did not have talking about the sub-postmasters on my bingo card today.’

There seem to be many MPs and peers who would try to draw a distinction between passing a law to overturn the convictions of all the prosecuted sub-postmasters (at the risk of including one or two who might actually have been guilty) and passing a law which implies that the Supreme Court — gasp! — might possibly be mistaken.

Among those apparently shocked by such a suggestion is the Liberal Democrat peer Lord Carlile, who fulminated that the Safety of Rwanda Bill is ‘a step towards totalitarianism . . . this is the Government elevating itself to an unacceptable level above the law, above our much-admired Supreme Court’.

Yet, as the distinguished jurist Lord Faulks points out, there have been three occasions when Parliament indeed reversed decisions by the Supreme Court. The most notable was after the Supreme Court, in a unanimous judgment in 2020, allowed an appeal by Gerry Adams against his conviction in 1975 for attempting to escape from lawful custody. This was a judgment which invited the former Sinn Fein leader and others detained between 1970 and 1974 to seek compensation for unlawful detention or wrongful conviction.

The country’s leading political think tank, Policy Exchange, then published a remarkable paper, setting out a compelling case that the Supreme Court was mistaken (it had judged that Adams had been unlawfully detained because the order for his detention had not been considered personally by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, but ‘only’ by a Minister of State).

Sabotage

Eight members of the House of Lords endorsed the Policy Exchange paper entitled ‘Reversing the Supreme Court’s judgment in R v Adams’. One of those peers who (successfully) called on Parliament to overturn the verdict of the Supreme Court was . . . Lord Carlile.

As the co-author of that paper, Richard Ekins KC (Oxford University’s professor of law and constitutional government) now observes of the Safety of Rwanda Bill and the new treaty between our countries: ‘Objections that [these] threaten the rule of law, or are seeking to use law to change facts, are misconceived. To insist that judges must have the final say would displace Parliament’s proper role as the ultimate decision-maker in our constitution.’

Of course, both Houses are required to pass the Bill; and the Lords, if it accepts the amendments in the name of the Archbishop of Canterbury and others, will sabotage the measure already passed by the Commons.

Entirely unrelated though it may be, I suspect the force of the Archbishop’s appeal in debate will have been weakened by the revelation that an Afghan asylum seeker and convicted sex offender wanted for a horrifying chemical attack on a woman and two children had been allowed to remain in this country because a priest vouched for his claim to have converted to Christianity.

Theology aside, there are purely practical arguments against the Rwanda scheme — for example, that it is an expensive business, and might not, even if passed into law, effect the removal of very many of the ‘boat people’. But it would be a deterrent to those paying many thousands of euros to the people smugglers — and, as the National Crime Agency has said, some sort of deterrent is now required. However ungodly.