The Illegal Migration Bill is “the Refugee Ban Bill” and why we must fight back

On 7 March, Home Secretary Suella Braverman introduced the Illegal Migration Bill in the UK Parliament. We oppose the Bill in its entirety. This proposed law removes

the right to seek asylum for people arriving in UK ‘irregularly’, instead rendering them permanently inadmissible to any protection status. This affects nearly all seeking asylum, as there are no ‘regular’ or safe routes to access the UK’s asylum system.

The Bill also ends legal recognition for trafficking survivors, if arriving ‘irregularly’.

The UN Refugee Agency said the bill is effectively an “asylum ban.” We agree. That is why we call it “the Refugee Ban Bill”. The Nationality and Borders Act 2022 criminalised irregular arrival to seek asylum – this Bill goes even further and extinguishes the right to even apply for asylum in the UK and have that claim considered. We should remember this is all meted out to refugees fleeing war, torture, and violence.

Through the Bill, the UK Government abandon not only their responsibilities under international law for refugee and anti-trafficking protection, but they also abandon people to be exploited and exposed to life-threatening harm; this time by smugglers and organised crime groups. That abandonment betrays the profound origins of these rights, from the international community’s resolve for a human rights system, in direct response to the Holocaust perpetrated before and during the Second World War.

The human consequences of this Bill are devastating. It means a family fleeing the Taliban in Afghanistan, or a woman fleeing violence from the Iranian regime and sexually exploited as she fled, or a man escaping forced labour in Eritrea – none of them would be able to claim asylum or seek protection as a survivor of trafficking. This proposed law slams the door on vulnerable people, including survivors of oppressive regimes and organised crime.

The Bill replaces asylum and trafficking protections with a duty on the Home Secretary to seek the removal of all arriving ‘irregularly’, irrespective of their circumstances, protection needs or exploitation suffered. This “duty to remove” is the rotten core of the Bill, trumping all other considerations. There can never be a “face behind the case”. Women, men, and children are consigned to a limbo of forcible removal, detention, destitution, and re-exploitation.

This “duty to remove” regime operates via both reduced Home Office accountability for how and where it uses its power to detain people, and sharp increases in the detained population, including mandatory 28day initial detention with no possibility of bail in that period. This detention regime is to include children. The Bill also removes

the court’s authority to challenge or overrule the decision to detain. Detention may be where the Home Secretary deems appropriate, including- but not only- in a detention centre or a short-term holding facility such as the Manston processing centre.

The Bill also gives the Home Secretary jurisdiction over the care of unaccompanied children. That is despite 222 lone children recently going missing from Home Office “hotels”. The Home Secretary will decide whether the Home Office or a local authority are the corporate parent. This is deeply inappropriate. Care responsibility must remain with child protection professionals working and accountable to Scots child law.

The Bill, in extinguishing recognition as a trafficking survivor if they arrived ‘irregularly’, may well be unlawful in human rights anti-trafficking law. That risk should underscore Scottish Ministers’ response to this Bill to protect the Human Trafficking and Exploitation (Scotland) Act 2015. The Bill is explicit in seeking to cut off Scottish devolved competence on survivor rights in the 2015 Act as well as prevent a future Scottish trafficking survivor identification and decisions system. This Bill is about protecting traffickers and punishing survivors, including in Scotland.

What we must do now in Scotland – together – to stop this Refugee Ban Bill

In short, this Bill is out of step with everything we stand for in Scotland. It offends our values and sense of fairness. It must be scrapped. It is an assault on the principle that all people deserve equal protection under the law and contrary to our belief in a system built on dignity, respect for the rule of law, fairness, and compassion.

We call on the Scottish Government, and all MSPs in the Scottish Parliament:

• To oppose this Bill in its entirety, and to make that opposition clear in communication with the UK Government and the UK Parliament;

• To bring a motion for debate to (a) withhold legislative consent for the Bill, (b) reject the Bill as a whole, and (c) outline a plan to protect refugees and trafficking survivors;

• To take all possible legal steps to ensure that Scotland complies with its obligations to protect victims of trafficking in Scotland, including legislation and litigation;

• To take all possible steps to ensure that lone migrant children are not detained in Scotland, are cared for in accordance with Scots child law, with full access to their independent guardianship service entitlement and other related rights; and

• To reaffirm our commitments in Scotland to the universality of human rights, including compliance with the Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights, as well as concluding the incorporation of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child and introduction of a new Scottish Human Rights Bill.

We ask all MPs, in particular those representing Scottish constituencies:

• To oppose this Bill in its entirety, to seek to remove as many of its provisions as is possible and to work collaboratively across party lines to do this.

We ask people and organisations across Scotland:

• To publicly reject this Refugee Ban Bill, in its entirety, and ask others to do the same;

• To write to your MSP and your MP asking them to oppose the Bill in

• Join Together With Refugees and help campaign for a compassionate asylum

We do not need new laws to prevent people from taking dangerous journeys, we simply need a government that starts doing its job, by providing safe, dignified, and legal routes.

You can sign and see the full list of signatories through this link: http://ow.ly/h5yT50NpSoQ

Discover the exciting journey of Art27scotland in this annual report. From our inception in May 2021 to the end of September 2022, we have been hard at work delivering a range of activities and initiatives aimed at promoting art and culture in Scotland. In this report, you will find a detailed account of our achievements, including the events we organized, the partnerships we formed, and the impact we made on our community. This report is a testament to our commitment to supporting the arts and celebrating the rich cultural diversity of Scotland.

“Cultural rights are an integral part of human rights and, like other rights, are universal, indivisible and interdependent.”

Check out our report with the Human Rights Consortium Scotland through this link: https://hrcscotland.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Final-The-right-to-cultural-life-in-Scotland-March-2023-1.pdf

This report was researched & carried out by Dr Lynsey Mitchell, Dr Elaine Webster & Dr Diana Camps.

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‘Speaking truth to power’: Blood lessons from the Troubles come to London

A play involving victims of the conflict will be seen by officers investigating collusion

Blood Red Lines, a play in which the performers tell their real-life stories of loss and pain in the Troubles, will be staged in London this week. Photograph: Columba O’Hare

Mark Paul London Correspondent

Wed Feb 15 2023 – 05:00

As we sat in the Swan pub down a side lane in Holborn, Dessie Trainor swirled his drink and told me about the night his mother was murdered.s

He was aged 13 and from Portadown, a loyalist stronghold in Armagh. His mother, Dorothy, was a Protestant and his father, Malachy, a Catholic. Mixed marriages could get you killed in the bitter, obscenity-strewn North of Ireland of 1975.

The couple were walking home from a night out. Gunmen from the Ulster Volunteer Force, and linked to the notorious Glenanne gang that colluded with British security services, lay in wait. Dorothy died while Malachy was critically injured, his life never the same again.

Eight months later, and 10 days before Christmas 1975, loyalists blew up Trainor’s house. His 17-year old brother, Ronnie, an INLA member, died. A little more than two years later, they killed Trainor’s older brother, Tommy, who was also linked to the republican group. He was shot with a friend as they walked back from a dole office.

Trainor said his mother’s murder made him “run about wild”. He ended up in Crumlin Road prison before he was 14. “My life was completely ruined,” he said. Alcoholism and depression beckoned, lessening only after he started a family of his own when he hit his 30s.

And so there we sat in this atmospheric little London pub, five of us around a table, delving into one man’s trauma. Londoners, oblivious, chatted all around us. I asked Trainor if he feels he is now healed. He hesitated for a moment and looked me in the eye, giving time to survey his face. Its lines, imprints and his ponderous expression silently answered my question.

“I still have my bad thoughts but I am better. And it is because of the play,” said Trainor.

The play is Blood Red Lines, written and directed by Scotsman Robert Rae, who joined us in the Swan alongside Trainor’s partner, Maria, and Yemeni musician Saber Bamatraf, who works with Rae in the Art27 project in Edinburgh. Yemen is also where some of the brutal community suppression tactics later adopted by the Glenanne Gang are said to have been formulated. Life brings people together in curious ways.

In Blood Red Lines, Trainor and 10 other people, all from or linked to the North, tell real-life stories of loss and pain. It includes the recollections of a former British soldier. The play has run at various locations in Ireland, North and South, since 2019 and was also performed at Edinburgh Fringe.

The Department of Foreign Affairs’s reconciliation fund is financing its first production in London. It runs this week from Thursday to Saturday at the London Irish Centre, just north of central London on Camden Square, the hip city enclave where Amy Winehouse lived and died.

Blood Red Lines is open to the London public, but this week it also has some special audience members.

Former Bedfordshire chief constable Jon Boutcher leads several independent investigations into the Troubles, including the Kenova examination of the handling of IRA informer Stakeknife. He also leads the Barnard Review into collusion and the Glennane gang, which killed Trainor’s mother. Boutcher saw Blood Red Lines in Edinburgh and this week all 60 members of his investigating team will see it in London.

“It gives the people in the play an opportunity to speak truth directly to power,” said Rae.

Boutcher said that traditionally there was a “remoteness” among those investigating incidents in the North.

“It went back to the risks involved. But that remoteness isn’t how people in England, Scotland and Wales would experience tragic events investigated there,” he said. “By going to see the play it builds trust and confidence with the families. I want them to see that for my investigators, this is vocational. It will be therapeutic for everyone.”

Back at the Swan, I asked Bamatraf, who was driven from his home country by Houthi rebels, if his experience with Blood Red Lines chimed with his experience of conflict in his home country. “We have some similar stories. For [Trainor and the others] it is their past. For us, it is our present. But the stories give me hope. It reminds that, actually, there is an end.”

For Trainor it may not be the end, but it is far better than what went before. The former British soldier in Blood Red Lines was at his house for Christmas dinner.

“I was basically a nobody. I didn’t even think I had a story to tell. But now every time we have put on this play, we’ve got a standing ovation. That makes me feel six feet tall.”

https://londonirishcentre.org/events/blood-red-lines/

Article link: https://www.irishtimes.com/world/uk/2023/02/15/speaking-truth-to-power-blood-lessons-from-the-troubles-come-to-london/