Lord Harper (Con)

I was not aware of that, but I am not sure it changes my argument. As we have just discovered by listening to the debates about Article 31 of the convention, part of the issue here is that the interpretation of the words is contested, as we heard from the points my noble friend Lord Murray set out when he talked about restoring what he feels is the original definition—indeed, that has already been done in the Nationality and Borders Act, which I think has about half-a-dozen interpretation sections interpreting parts of the convention—and from what the noble Baroness said when she disagreed that that was the original intention. The whole point is that, if there are disputes about what the convention means, somebody has to decide what it means. It can be either be courts and judges or Parliament setting out what we think we have signed up to and being clear about that, and Parliament has done so in a number of cases. If you put this amendment into statute, it would effectively say that judges could assert that what Parliament said was not the interpretation of the convention and a judge would decide what to do. The noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said that she has been careful to word this amendment so that the court could not strike down primary legislation. If I may say so, I do not think that is a terribly good safeguard, because an enormous amount of our immigration legislation is not primary legislation but secondary legislation. All the Immigration Rules are secondary legislation made by Ministers using primary legislative powers, so unless there is something explicitly in the primary legislation which gives Ministers powers to make Immigration Rules that specifically forbids a court being able to do this, if this amendment were carried, a court could strike down our Immigration Rules. That would in effect mean judges, not Ministers, making the decision. Of course those Immigration Rules are not just made by Ministers; Ministers draft them, but they are put before both Houses of Parliament and approved by Parliament. In the end, my contention is that, if you want to have an immigration system that carries the support of the public, decisions have to be made by people who are accountable to the public. The noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, talked about the convention being chipped away. Part of the issue is that a large number of members of the public do not think that it works for them. They think that people can come to this country as economic migrants, put their hands up and say that they are asylum seekers, and that that somehow gives them a free pass. When I was Immigration Minister, I argued that we should have a tough system that lets people with a good claim stay but is clear that, where people do not have a good claim, we will kick them out. All that the charities that end up supporting them do is damage the public’s support for our asylum system. If people think that this is a way of getting around the system for economic migrants who get here, and that courts interpret the legislation in a way that is not intended by Ministers who are accountable to Parliament, it damages public support for the very principle that the noble Baroness is setting out; that is incredibly damaging.