Why we must go after the criminal smuggling gangs – and distinguish between the criminals and victims: Border, Security And Immigration Bill. Committee (2nd Day)
Relevant documents: 4th Report from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, 10th Report from the Constitution Committee. Scottish and Northern Ireland legislative consent granted, Welsh legislative consent sought.
3.48pm
Clause 13: Supplying articles for use in immigration crime
Amendment 31
Moved by
31: Clause 13, page 7, line 9, leave out “knows or suspects that” and insert “intends that, or is reckless as to whether,”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives effect to the JCHR’s recommendation that the mens rea threshold for clause 13 ought to be one of intention or recklessness.
My Lords, the first part of day 2 in Committee deals with organised immigration crime offences. We will hear later about safeguards and modern slavery, and will return to the question of what might constitute a reasonable explanation on the part of an irregular migrant, but we begin with Amendments 31 and 41 in my name, which deal with mens rea. I am also happy to be associated with Amendments 32, 42 and 53, which are grouped with these. The Committee should note too that these amendments are linked to the next group, beginning with Amendment 33. I will keep some of my powder dry in suggesting why the Minister should also give them a fair wind or at least a promise of further consideration.
The Committee will know that the amendments in this and the subsequent group are among the recommendations contained in the Joint Committee on Human Rights report on the Bill, appearing in the report as amendment 3. I was grateful to the Minister for his assurance that, before we reach the next stage of the Bill in September, there will be a considered response to the JCHR report and its recommendations.
As a grammar school boy from a council estate with a mother whose first language was Irish rather than English, I remember being daunted as an 11 year- old by my first lesson in Latin. Later in life I read with some amusement that Winston Churchill questioned the use of the vocative case “O table” when learning the word mensa. His teacher’s explanation, that it was used to address a table, was met with Churchill’s practical, albeit impertinent, response, “But I never do”. However, I think the great man would have seen much more practical use for the words mens rea, meaning guilty mind in Latin.
Linguistics to one side, my barrister daughter assures me that it remains a crucial concept in criminal law. It refers to the mental state of a defendant at the time of committing a crime, specifically their intention, knowledge or recklessness regarding the prohibited act. That mental element, along with the physical act, actus reus, must be proven for a person to be found guilty of a crime.
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My Amendment 31 would leave out “knows or suspects that” and insert
“intends that, or is reckless as to whether”.
This amendment would give effect to the JCHR’s recommendation that the mens rea threshold for Clause 13 ought to be one of intention or recklessness. Amendment 41, which is amendment 4 in the Joint Committee report, appears at Clause 14, page 8, line 9. It would leave out “knows or suspects that” and insert
“intends that, or is reckless as to whether”.
Amendment 41 would also give effect to the JCHR recommendation that the mens rea threshold for Clause 14 ought to be one of intention or recklessness. It would have the same effect as Amendment 31, but in a different clause.
Put these amendments into the context of Clauses 13 to 17, which create three new precursor offences to target the activities of facilitators and organised criminal gangs that look to profit from organised immigration crime. These amendments seek to raise the mens rea threshold for which someone might be caught by the offence of supplying, offering to supply or handling a relevant article for use in the commission of certain immigration offences. The words in Clause 13, “knows or suspects that”, are a lower mens rea threshold compared with intention and recklessness, which is what the JCHR recommendation is urging us to substitute.
The JCHR report notes that
“comparable precursor terrorism offences have a higher mental element, requiring intention to commit or assist in the commission of terrorist acts”.
In paragraph 17 of the JCHR report, Liberty provides an example in its written evidence. It illustrates how a woman fleeing persecution who has had her phone stolen, and her British grandfather who provides her with a phone to help her—despite suspecting that she will use it to contact smugglers—might both be caught by this offence. In paragraph 19 of the JCHR report, ILPA, the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, provides a further example:
“A well-meaning individual providing voluntary humanitarian assistance in Calais hands out SIM Cards. A father receives one and passes a mobile phone and the SIM card to his daughter”.
They may both be prosecuted for having supplied a relevant article.
Paragraph 38 of the JCHR report concludes that
“the breadth of these precursor offences”
captured in Clauses 13 to 17
“poses a risk of unintended harms to those who are most vulnerable”.
These relevant amendments seek to mitigate this risk by seeking greater circumscription and more robust safeguards.
Paragraph 50 of the JCHR report similarly concludes that the precursor offences captured in Clauses 13 to 17
“create uncertainty, extend beyond the Government’s stated … aim, and risk inadvertently criminalising persons who ought to be protected from criminal penalty”.
I hope the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Hanson, agrees that some fine-tuning, while not preventing prosecutions, could strike a better balance. I commend the amendments to the Committee and beg to move.
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My Lords, I am extremely grateful to the Minister for the way in which he has dealt with this group of amendments and for the thorough response he has given to your Lordships in Committee this afternoon. For the avoidance of doubt, I reiterate that the Joint Committee on Human Rights welcomes the overall aims of the Bill—to deter organised crime and prevent the loss of life at sea. It is right that the Government do all they can to ensure there is a legislative framework in place to help eradicate this dangerous criminality. All of us who have spoken in the debate today are agreed about that.
The issue comes down to one of judgment about whether it is preventive, whether it is a deterrent and whether it will really make any difference to those who will anyway try to break these laws. Are we doing the right things to combat this criminality? I do not know all the answers to that any more than the Joint Committee on Human Rights does, but I am grateful for what the Minister said about the importance of the report the committee produced and many of the questions we have rightly raised.
In parentheses, I am glad that organisations such as Liberty take these issues as seriously as they do. They gave very valuable evidence to the committee during its inquiry. You do not have to always agree with the positions of NGOs or groups to know that they are part of the civic response to issues of this kind. We are very fortunate to have such organisations in our country.
My Lords, if the noble Lord would give way on a point of agreement, I would be grateful to him. To be clear, I am also grateful that organisations such as Liberty exist and that they have views on things—I just do not agree with them. I too am very grateful that we live in a country where such organisations exist and have contrary views. On that point, we are in complete agreement.
I was about to say that I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Harper, for the other points he made but, yes, we are agreed about that too. I thank his noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, and, on the Front Bench, the noble Lord, Lord Cameron, for the way in which they put their arguments this afternoon. I was not surprised by those arguments, which were put quite eloquently in our committee, incidentally, as some here will almost certainly remember, by the noble Lord, Lord Murray of Blidworth, who was of course a Minister in the last Government. We can disagree about these things without having to fall out over it.
I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Green. We do not agree about many of these questions, but we know there is a public conviction that wants something done about illegality. That is why I argue for safe and legal routes, which my noble friend and I disagree on. We have to find other ways forward of tackling the root cause. I can sound like a broken record about this, but there are 122 million displaced people in the world today and that has doubled in the last decade. If we do not deal with the root causes, we will go on introducing Bills such as this indefinitely, ad nauseam, and will still not get to the root of dealing with the problem.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, presented the arguments perfectly as she always does. I strongly agree with her remark that we are taking these actions on slight or no evidence. She said that it does not require much for a prosecution. We must not emasculate our laws or commitments to things such as the refugee convention to try to tackle something we all know needs to be tackled; it is a question of striking the right balance.
I have listened to what the Minister has said in Committee this afternoon. He is right that we should all reflect on this. I look forward to seeing what he has to say to the Joint Committee when he publishes his response. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment 31 withdrawn.
Amendment 32 not moved.
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Amendment 33
Moved by
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33: Clause 13, page 7, line 12, at end insert “, and
(c) P derives a financial or material benefit, directly or indirectly, from the supply or offer to supply a relevant article.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment gives effect to the JCHR’s recommendation that the scope of the offence in clause 13 should only apply to persons involved in the smuggling of persons for direct or indirect financial or material gain.
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My Lords, I hope that the Committee will bear with me as I now bring Joint Committee on Human Rights Amendments 33, 35, 38, 44, 57 and 203 for consideration. Amendment 33 appears as amendment 1 in the Joint Committee report and would give effect to the JCHR’s recommendation that the scope of the offence in Clause 13 should apply only to persons involved in the smuggling of persons for direct or indirect financial or material gain.
I described in the debate on the earlier group how Clauses 13 to 17 create three new precursor offences to target the activities of facilitators and organised criminal gangs who look to profit from organised immigration crime. Paragraphs 38 and 50 of the JCHR report conclude that the breadth of the precursor offences captured in those clauses risks
“unintended harms to those who are most vulnerable”
and
“inadvertently criminalising persons who ought to be protected from criminal penalty”.
Ultimately, the scope of the offences is therefore broad, and we should at least consider that.
Paragraph 51 of the JCHR report recommends:
“The Government should give consideration to amending the scope of the offences to ensure that they only apply to persons involved in the smuggling of persons for direct or indirect financial or material gain”.
That is what this amendment seeks to achieve.
I refer again to the examples from Liberty and the ILPA on how the scope of these offences might apply to those who are not smugglers. Amendment 35 would insert, at Clause 13, page 7, line 15:
“For the purpose of subsection (2), a defence of reasonable excuse must be interpreted in accordance with Article 31 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 1951, Article 5 of the Protocol against Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air 2000, and section 26 of the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings 2005”,
all of which this country is committed to. The amendment would give effect to the JCHR recommendation that the defence of reasonable excuse in Clause 13 must be interpreted compatibly with the UK’s international legal obligations not to penalise refugees, smuggled persons and the victims of trafficking in certain circumstances.
Clauses 13 and 14 provide for non-exhaustive reasonable excuses to the aforementioned precursor offences. They include actions to rescue a person from danger or serious harm and actions taken on behalf of an organisation that aims to assist asylum seekers for free, not making money out of the exercise. The rationale for strengthening that provision is explained in the recommendations in paragraph 51 of the report:
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“The defence of ‘reasonable excuse’ ought to explicitly provide that it must be interpreted compatibly with Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, Article 5 of the Smuggling Protocol, and section 26 of the Council of Europe Convention Against Trafficking”—
hence Amendment 35.
Recall that Article 31 prohibits the general imposition of penalties on refugees on account of their unlawful entry or presence in the country where they claim asylum. This protection applies to refugees who come directly from the state where they first faced persecution. In September 2024 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees published legal guidance on international protection relating to non-penalisation of refugees on account of irregular entry. It acknowledges that in seeking asylum, many are compelled to arrive, enter or stay in a territory without authorisation or documentation, or
“with documentation which is insufficient, false or obtained by fraudulent means, or by using clandestine modes of entry”.
Article 5 of the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air, of 2000, provides that:
“Migrants shall not become liable to criminal prosecution”
for the fact of having been smuggled with intent by persons
“in order to obtain, directly or indirectly, a financial or other material benefit”.
Article 26 of ECAT provides for a “Non-punishment provision” for victims of human trafficking who have been engaged in illegal activities provided that
“they have been compelled to do so”.
As the noble Lord, Lord Harper, mentioned during his remarks earlier, we will hear later from the noble Baroness, Lady May, on the subject of human trafficking. In circumstances where victims of trafficking have committed an offence of supplying or handling relevant articles or collecting information likely to be useful in immigration crime, they must not be prosecuted if the commission of these offences was as a result of trafficking. Any prosecution of victims in such circumstances would be in breach of Article 26 of ECAT.
5.00pm
While the Government have put forward the commendable aim of disrupting the criminal networks engaged in smuggling people to the UK, Professor Sarah Singer said in oral evidence to our committee that
“these offences will not be targeted at the people who conduct people-smuggling operations, most of whom never set foot on UK soil and will not be reached by the new offences. Rather, who will be targeted? … the very vulnerable people who are seeking asylum in this country and making these irregular journeys, because they have no other option”.
Amendment 38, which appears in the JCHR report as amendment 2, proposes that a person P commits an offence if
“P derives a financial or material benefit, directly or indirectly from the handling of a relevant article”.
This amendment gives effect to our recommendation that
“the scope of the offence in clause 14 should only apply to persons involved in the smuggling of persons for direct or indirect financial or material gain”.
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Paragraphs 38 and 50 of the JCHR report conclude that the breadth of the precursor offences captured in Clauses 13 and 17 of the Bill risk unintended harms to those who are most vulnerable, and
“risk inadvertently criminalising persons who ought to be protected from criminal penalty”.
Ultimately, we say that the scope of the offences is too broad. Paragraph 51 of the JCHR report recommends:
“The Government should give consideration to amending the scope of the offences to ensure that they only apply to persons involved in the smuggling of persons for direct or indirect financial or material gain”.
That is what this amendment seeks to achieve.
I turn to Amendment 44, which proposes inserting into Clause 14:
“For the purpose of subsection (3), a defence of reasonable excuse must be interpreted compatibly with Article 31 of the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 1951, Article 5 of the Protocol against Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air 2000, and section 26 of the Council of Europe Convention on Action against Trafficking in Human Beings 2005”.
As the explanatory statement says:
“This amendment gives effect to the JCHR recommendation that the defence of reasonable excuse in clause 14 must be interpreted compatibly with the UK’s … legal obligations not to penalise refugees, smuggled persons, and victims of trafficking”.
So it would have the same effect as Amendment 35, but it is in a different clause, to which I have already spoken.
Penultimately, I will say a word about Amendment 57. As the Committee knows, Clause 16 creates the offence of
“Collecting information for use in immigration crime”.
Clause 16 provides, as we have heard, for two defences. The first defence requires the person
“to show that their action or possession was for the purposes of a journey to be made only by them”.
The second requires the person
“to show that they had a reasonable excuse”.
However, paragraph 27 of the JCHR report highlights that, while the list of what counts as a “reasonable excuse” in the Bill is non-exhaustive,
“those seeking asylum, or the family members of those seeking asylum, are not provided with an express defence”.
Once again, I would cite Professor Sarah Singer’s evidence, which I referred to in connection with Amendment 35 and will not, therefore, repeat.
Lastly, Amendment 203 in this group appears as amendment 7 in the JCHR report, and the arguments are set out on page 20 of the report. It would insert a new clause. In brief, Section 31 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999 provides a statutory defence for refugees committing particular offences provided that they satisfy stated conditions. The specified offences include forgery and connected uses, the use of deception to obtain or seek to obtain leave to enter or remain or to secure the avoidance, postponement or revocation of enforcement action, the falsification of documents and offences under the Identity Documents Act 2010. Paragraph 44 of the JCHR report notes the recommendation of the previous committee that Section 31 should be amended to cover all offences relating to unauthorised entry. Our report states:
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“Domestic law would offer no statutory defence for those prosecuted for these new offences, or for the underlying offences of illegal entry/arrival or assisting unlawful migration”.
Again, this is intended to ensure compliance with Article 31 of the refugee convention and to address what the UNHCR has previously described as “deep concern” about the limitation of Section 31 defences.
I end by recalling that Article 31 prohibits the general imposition of penalties on refugees on account of their unlawful entry or presence in the country where they claim asylum. This protection applies to refugees who come directly from the state where they face persecution. So Amendment 203 gives effect to the JCHR recommendations that the offences in Clauses 13, 14 and 16 of the Bill, as well as the offence of illegal entry under Section 24 of the Immigration Act 1971, should be added to Section 31 of the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, which provides a statutory defence for refugees in certain circumstances.
I am grateful to the Committee for bearing with me through this long group of amendments. I have tried to describe as briefly as I can what is in them, but I recognise that there is a lot here to consider. I hope the Minister will at least think about taking them away to look at them further between now and Report, but in any event I beg to move.
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My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for his response to this long list of amendments. I apologised earlier to the Committee that, inevitably, it was going to take time to get through them all.
We are agreed about one thing. The Bill is there to target those who are profiting from organised crime. There is no disagreement in the House about this. It is not a binary choice between the victims or the profiteers. The people they are exploiting need to be protected, but at present, there is a risk that the most vulnerable are caught by some of these offences. Again, we are agreed about that; how we do it is what matters. It is the role of committees such as the Joint Committee on Human Rights to scrutinise these things in detail—even issues such as hygiene kits. That came up as an amendment in the committee from one of its members, who said that the Government should at least examine this. It is on page 67 of the report, which details amendment 8, which inserts “hygiene kits” in Clause 15, thereby extending the list of included items.
I am grateful to the Minister for his responses to the noble Baronesses, Lady Hamwee and Lady Chakrabarti. This issue can be looked at outside of our proceedings. I will take away the points he has made, and those of all noble Lords who have participated in this excellent debate. I will make a couple of brief remarks. The noble Lord, Lord Deben, talked a lot about the international agreements that have been entered into. Our duty is to comply with those. They are living documents, open to challenge and amendment. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, in pressing the Government, as I have done previously, to let us know as soon as possible, before Report, what their thinking is on Article 8 of the ECHR.
It was not just the ECHR that I referred to in these amendments. We also referred to the protocol against smuggling and Article 26 of the Council of Europe Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings, published in 2005, to which we are a signatory. These are important questions that we must always benchmark our actions here against. It is not that we are caught in a trap of international agreements; we, as a nation, have entered into them, and they are obligations we must live up to.
As far as the interpretation of the courts is concerned, my noble friend Lord Faulks made a very good point. Just as there needs to be further training—for instance, in lower-tier tribunals, a point we have discussed previously—it is not beyond the ability of our judges
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to give direction on many of these international conventions, which all of us are very familiar with anyway. Regarding Article 8, the Danish Government and others would not normally be regarded as hostile to international action. Donald Tusk was one of the signatories of the email that the noble Lord, Lord German, referred to earlier—it had no destination but caused quite a lot of controversy inside the Council of Europe and the European Court. It has provoked a debate, which was overdue, on whether that interpretation of Article 8 is correct. We all welcome that.
The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said that we should go after the people who are monetarising this issue. She is right. She is also right that we have had a fine tradition in this country. She said that it was the world’s apology for the Holocaust to introduce the European Convention. A lot of other factors were involved there, but we all know that British lawyers, British politicians and the Conservative Party leadership at that time were deeply committed to the creation of European scaffold to govern some of these questions. Times have changed, and some of the challenges are different. That is not a reason for walking away from our obligations. It is a reason for standing together with others who want to make sense of these things, so that we protect those who are at risk and ensure that we go after those who are acting in a criminal manner.
I will take back to the Joint Committee the points the Minister has made. I am grateful that he will respond before Report. That will give us a chance to decide on amendments of a similar nature, or others which work in the eyes of the Government. We can continue to discuss this outside Committee, and whether it is possible to bring them back. For now, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment 33 withdrawn.
Amendments 34 to 37 not moved.
Clause 13 agreed.
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My Lords, I too am a signatory to Amendment 49. It is a great pleasure to support both amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady May. In parenthesis, I should say that, in 2015, along with my noble and learned friend Lady Butler-Sloss, it was a great pleasure to support what was then ground-breaking legislation. It was a classic, textbook example of how to make good law: first, we had robust pre-legislative scrutiny; the noble Baroness, in her role as the Home Secretary of the day, along with Dame Karen Bradley, was magnificent in steering the legislation through; and we had bicameral agreement across both Houses, with amendments being made and accepted as the Bill went through both Houses.
I might add that the Joint Committee on Human Rights is currently conducting a new inquiry—the Minister will be pleased to hear—into supply chain transparency and modern-day slavery, and the noble Baroness, Lady May, has been extraordinarily generous with her time and in making a wonderful written submission to the committee. I know that this will be taken into account when we come to write our report and its recommendations; 2015 is a decade ago and, as the noble Baroness has recognised, issues like Section 54 need to be looked at again. The way we use the Proceeds of Crime Act needs to be looked at in relation to modern-day slavery and human trafficking. It is another living document, something that, from time to time, we have to go back to. I believe that the whole House would want to pay tribute to the noble Baroness for the commitment that she has given to people who are victims of modern-day slavery.
I referred to Dame Karen Bradley. For some time, I was a trustee of the Arise Foundation charity; I see that my noble friend Lord Hogan-Howe, who was also a trustee of Arise, is here. We became intimately involved in some of the personal cases that were raised by victims of modern slavery. With the noble Lord, Lord German, at an event that he kindly hosted a couple of weeks ago for Kalayaan—another wonderful charity that works with victims of modern slavery—we heard some heart-rending cases of people who had been trafficked but who had come through the national referral mechanism. It would be helpful for later stages of the Bill if the Minister were able to give us some updated information about the numbers of people who are in the national referral mechanism at present, and the average time that people spend in the NRM. At the event in the Attlee Room, hosted by the noble Lord, Lord German, we heard, for instance, from one woman who had been four years in the national referral mechanism.
There is always work to be done, but the noble Baroness’s amendments, especially Amendment 49, are incredibly important. People who go into the NRM have to prove their justification and right to be able to stay in the United Kingdom. If they do not have access to the evidence—if it has been taken away —then it will be impossible for them to prove their case; it will undermine the victim seeking determination by the NRM.
At pages 21 and 22 of the Joint Committee on Human Rights report, which I referred to at some length earlier today, the committee warns of the danger of breaching the European Convention on Action Against Trafficking in Human Beings, and points to our obligations to victims of modern slavery and human trafficking. We should never forget that victims of modern slavery and human trafficking did not come here willingly and were not migrants; they are victims of a heinous crime. The noble Baroness is right to remind us of the distinctions that we should make.
On 16 April, the Minister replied to my Written Question HL6468, asking for the Government’s response to the manifesto entitled Putting Victims First: Renewing the UK Commitment to Victims of Trafficking and Modern Slavery, which was published in July last year by a coalition of modern slavery organisations. In his helpful Answer, the Minister said:
“The Government continues to engage with the coalition … keeping all aspects of asylum and immigration systems under regular review including in relation to trafficking and modern slavery”.
I would be grateful if the Minister could say whether they have discussed with the coalition the protection of belongings of people likely to have been trafficked and, if so, what response they received. If not, I hope that they will do so between now and Report. I hope that the Government, and the Minister, will accept the excellent amendments from the noble Baroness, Lady May.
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June 26th 2025. Day 1 of Committee
My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, has given us a foretaste of the consideration we will give to Amendment 206, tabled by her noble friend Lady Hamwee and to which I have added my name, which is about Europol. I agree with what she said. I also agree with the interventions made by other noble Lords, including the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, who spoke on behalf of his noble friend Lord Browne, about the importance of consultation. Of course, I agree with what the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, said. She has no reason to fear; no one will ever accuse her of being pompous. She was right to remind us about the importance of the use of words, drawing our attention to “irregular” and “illegal”.
I will speak to Amendment 7, moved very ably by the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Lochiel, on his behalf and that of his noble friend, the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Gower, which spells out what the duties of the commander should be in
“reducing the number of illegal migrant crossings, and … increasing the prosecutions of criminal organisations who facilitate illegal migrant crossings”.
In some ways it seems almost otiose to include this in the Bill, as those are clearly the main reasons why the Government brought it forward in the first place, but I understand the need sometimes to use Bills as a form of semaphore to send out signals and why the Opposition Front Bench might wish to do that.
As the Minister knows, I apologised for being unable to speak at Second Reading because a group of us from the Joint Committee on Human Rights, which I chair, were in Strasbourg to talk about, among other things, interpretations of Article 8 of the ECHR, prosecutions, the number of illegal crossings—as referred to in this amendment—and the criminal gangs manipulating and profiteering on the backs of often desperate people. During that visit, we met, among others, Tim Eicke KC, who has been the British judge in the European court for the past nine years. As noble Lords will know, the Government have put forward the names of three others who will take his place. I am glad to say that he has told me that he is willing to come to your Lordships’ House when he returns in September to share with us many of the experiences that he has had over these past nine years.
The European court and the Council of Europe are not our enemies; some of your Lordships were able to participate in the debate that I moved on behalf of the Cross Benches a few weeks ago on the European Convention on Human Rights—its origins, which we have been celebrating as it is its 75th anniversary, and its importance in this day and age. The Council of Europe and the European convention are inextricably linked. I wanted members of our committee to evaluate and understand that, because if one were to leave the convention it would mean also leaving the Council of Europe and disentangling ourselves from many of the things that I believe will help us ensure that the number of illegal crossings will be reduced and the number of prosecutions increased, because we have to do these things across borders and with our neighbours. If we do not, we will certainly not stem the staggering numbers of people leaving their homelands to make these dangerous crossings.
The Council of Europe and the court shared our concerns in all the discussions that we had. These are not our enemies. We discussed the exploitation and displacement of a staggering 122 million people—a number that has nearly doubled in the past decade. The number of refugees and persons in need of international protection reached over 42 million, while the number of internally displaced people rose to around 74 million. More than two-thirds of refugees originated from just six countries: Syria, Afghanistan, Ukraine, South Sudan, Sudan and Venezuela. A rough but telling extrapolation from these figures suggests that around one in every 67 people on earth has been forcibly displaced. These people are the shadow which hangs over our debate on this amendment and others today.
On 20 June, the Joint Committee on Human Rights published its report on this Bill. It runs to over 80 pages and I commend it to your Lordships. It is available in the Printed Paper Office. At paragraph 13, we remarked:
“It was not within the scope of this inquiry to look at wider issues such as the root causes of the refugee crisis or proposals for offering safe and legal routes to those in need of protection. Whilst this Bill focuses exclusively on tackling organised immigration crime, we encourage the Government to seek to address the underlying root causes which are fuelling the global refugee crisis”.
We cannot dodge that challenge. I strongly agree with the UNHCR, which, in its recent analysis of global trends, was emphatic that, for meaningful progress to be made,
“we must address the root causes”.
It is a point that I have repeatedly—perhaps some would say tediously—made in your Lordships’ House. Simply blaming international humanitarian law will not be part of the solution.
To be clear, the Joint Committee welcomes the Bill’s overall aims to deter organised crime and prevent loss of life at sea. Of course, we would therefore agree with the terms of this amendment as it is drafted. It is right that the Government do all they can to ensure that a legislative framework is in place to help eradicate this terrible and dangerous criminality, but we will not do that by diminishing our obligations to uphold international conventions and commitments.
The noble Lord, Lord Hanson, does an admirable job in his role at the Home Office and I join others in paying tribute to him. I have been deeply impressed by the work he does and it is good to have got to know him over the distance. The Minister knows as well as I do that, if offences are applied too broadly, refugees, victims of people smuggling and modern slavery are being put at risk of being criminalised rather than the smugglers. We have to help the victims as well as tackle the smugglers; it is not a question of one or the other. The Bill needs to target those who are profiting from organised immigration crime. The people they are exploiting need to be protected, but at present there is a risk that the most vulnerable are caught by some of the new offences. We are united in wishing to reduce the number of illegal crossings, but we are wary of enacting laws which could have unforeseeable consequences.
I will return to some of these points in later groups. I will try not to be repetitive—we have to make progress on this Bill. I welcome the debate we have had so far on this group and the spirit in which it has been conducted. It is admirable, and far better than some of the exchanges that we had in the previous Parliament, both in the Joint Committee on Human Rights and on the Floor of the House. I hope, as we proceed, that we will keep these two objectives in our sights: first, to tackle the illegality of those who are putting lives at risk on a daily basis and, secondly, the importance of protecting those who are so vulnerable.
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