Channel migrants barred from using human rights laws to avoid deportation from Britain in new crackdown to be revealed by Home Secretary
Channel migrants are not allowed to use human rights laws to avoid being removed from Britain under measures to be revealed by Suella Braverman.
Hard powers will be included in the Home Secretary’s landmark immigration bill due to be published early next week.
It will severely restrict the way claims under the Human Rights Act can be used by asylum seekers arriving via ‘irregular routes’ such as across the English Channel, the Daily Mail understands.
In some cases, they will not be able to appeal until they are removed from this country.
The bill is also expected to strengthen measures that allow asylum applications to be declared ‘inadmissible’.
Hard powers will be included in the Home Secretary’s landmark immigration bill due to be published early next week. File image of migrants crossing the English Channel
Rishi Sunak has made “stopping the boats” one of his top five pledges to voters. In December he vowed the government would “make it unequivocally clear that if you enter the UK illegally, you are not allowed to stay here.”
The legislation, tentatively titled the Illegal Migration Bill, will make it easier for the Department of the Interior to deny claims from small boat migrants.
Under current Home Office rules, an asylum application can be declared inadmissible “if the claimant was previously present in or otherwise connected with a safe third country…provided there is a reasonable prospect of bringing him in a reasonable time to a safe third country. ‘.
The guidance also describes a number of complex stages that Home Office employees must go through in order to declare a case inadmissible and gives a six-month timetable.
Claims are assessed by two separate units within the Ministry of the Interior: the National Asylum Allocation Unit and the Third Country Unit.
It is this system that is likely to be streamlined under the new legislation.
It was unclear last night whether the bill will include measures to facilitate the deportation of migrants to Rwanda. Ministers want to avoid a repeat of last year’s fiasco, when an order from the European Court of Human Rights blocked the start of the first charter flight to Rwanda at 11am.
The Bill of Rights, published last June, states that ‘no account shall be taken of any provisional measures taken by the European Court of Human Rights’.
However, the Bill of Rights was temporarily sent back to the drawing board under the reign of Liz Truss – and has still not been introduced by Mr Sunak.
The government’s Rwanda plan, which would give asylum seekers a one-way ticket to the East African country, was declared legal by judges in December, but a series of legal appeals are likely to be launched.
Channel migrants barred from using human rights laws to avoid being removed from Britain under measures to be revealed by Suella Braverman (pictured last week)
The bill will be published ahead of a key summit between the Prime Minister and French President Emmanuel Macron on Friday.
It comes after nearly 46,000 migrants crossed the Channel by small boat last year, compared to 28,500 in 2021. The legislative package will strengthen existing laws stipulating that anyone entering the UK illegally is committing a crime. This is believed to help deliver on Mr Sunak’s pledge to ‘apprehend and swiftly remove’ anyone arriving in Britain via irregular routes.
Ministers are expected to battle over the new laws. Human rights activists will almost certainly argue that the inadmissibility measures and other aspects of the new bill violate international refugee treaties.
The legislation is also expected to tighten modern slavery laws that are being exploited by migrants to avoid removal and by criminal gangs to delay police investigations.