Member

The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, has good intentions with Amendment 184. I can see that it is probably not going to gain a lot of traction with the Minister, but I think that she has been pushed towards this position because there is such undermining of our commitment to the refugee convention. Speaking personally—I do not know whether my Front Bench colleague, my noble friend Lord German, agrees with me because I am afraid I have not checked with him—I see considerable merit in the wording of Amendment 185 because it seems to me that it should be a broad defence to prosecution that someone comes under the terms of Article 31(1) of the refugee convention, yet what we have at the moment is a patchwork, and the noble Baroness well described it. Someone who comes with forged papers is treated in one way, and someone who comes with no papers is treated in a completely different way, and that seems to me to be an unsustainable position. I think a clean assertion without all these caveats and exceptions has considerable merit, but, again, I fear that the Minister might not be persuaded. I have a lot of time for the motivation and some of the wording of what the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, is trying to do. I think she would not have to mount this effort if it were not for the assaults that are taking place on the refugee convention.