MP fights bid to send refugees to ocean island
BIRMINGHAM MP Andrew Mitchell is leading opposition to plans to send asylum seekers to an overseas island, at a cost of almost £2 million per person each year.
The Government’s Nationality and Borders Bill will allow the Government to send asylum seekers to a “safe third country” for processing.
It is thought the Government hopes to ship asylum seekers to Ascension Island, in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, after countries such as Ghana and Albania made it clear they are unwilling to co-operate.
Ascension Island is a British overseas territory.
Australia already operates a similar scheme, in which asylum seekers are held in on the island of Nauru. Some were previously also held in Papua New Guinea, but Australian courts ruled this was illegal. The cost, including the construction of facilities, has been around 3.39 million Australian dollars, or £1.9 million, per person annually.
Mr Mitchell, Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield, said: “I hope they’ll come to the conclusion it’s not a sensible way to address the problem they are rightly seeking to solve.
“It would be better to employ several hundred more people to process the claims and to fix an appeal process that is too often exploited by over-enterprising lawyers.”
The House of Lords has already amended the Government’s legislation to remove the section allowing the UK to follow Australia’s example.
However, Home Secretary Priti Patel is now asking MPs in the House of Commons to overturn the amendment.
Mr Mitchell is to speak in the Commons setting out the case for opposing the Government’s plan.
Opposition in the Lords was led by Timothy Kirkhope, a former Conservative MP who served as Immigration Minister in the 1990s. He said the proposal “would be a clear breach of the principles of the 1951 convention on refugees, as well as providing substantial legal concerns as to the responsibility for dealing with applications.”