Contribution
It is around one in four. It was 80% in the country I referenced, which is significantly more. The equivalent figure for this country is much, much too high—I would want it to be zero—but that makes the exact point, which I think the hon. Member did not want to draw out, that those countries are worse than we are. We should not be importing large quantities of unvetted young men from those cultures without a proper way of dealing with that. We do not have a way of doing that.
The Government inadvertently admitted that, as they have had to actively tell those people not to rape women. That is because they know the things I have said about the differences in attitudes towards women in many of those countries. The question is: what do we do about it? I am clear that it should be up to us to decide who comes here from what countries and on what basis. We should decide asylum policy—not the people smugglers—and the routes on which people come. The Conservatives have been clear and admitted that we should have been quicker in bringing in our own deterrence policy, but we are committed to doing that now and have a plan for it. That is what actually counts.
The only country that has successfully dealt with this issue is Australia. It saw a decrease of more than 90% in the number of people crossing the sea and entering illegally by saying, “If you come here illegally under that method, you don’t get to stay—end of story.” That worked, and we should do exactly the same thing. The Government like to talk about the failure of the Rwanda plan and the four people sent as volunteers. They know that those people went voluntarily. It is clearly not a deterrent if someone goes voluntarily, but we were never allowed to use the scheme as a deterrent to deport people whether they wanted to go or not.
The Government can do everything they want to reform and tweak the operation of human rights laws in this country, but there are two ways in which that approach is fundamentally flawed. First, it does not matter if a claim can be successfully rejected if someone cannot be deported to the country they came from. It is completely futile. Unless the hon. Member for South Norfolk (Ben Goldsborough) thinks that we will deport people en masse to Afghanistan or some other third world, war-torn country, clearly, whatever we might want to do around the validity of their claim is worthless if we cannot send them to another country or back to the country they came from. Secondly, we have talked about the nature of the claims and how we might tweak them. The European Court of Human Rights is a precedent-setting Court. If it makes a ruling and sets a precedent, ultimately, that will hold sway.
I asked the hon. Member for South Norfolk to comment on article 3, which he failed to do. That is just one example of how the European convention on human rights has become totally distorted. Article 3 was originally envisioned to prevent people from being deported to a country where they might face torture. That was the aim of the article. It is now used to say that when someone comes to our country and commits horrendous crimes such as rape, but they have a psychiatric illness, it is torture if the country we seek to deport them to does not have adequate healthcare provision. Under article 3, that is not allowed. Who can reasonably argue that that was envisioned by all the people the hon. Member referenced when they created a set of rights which, at the time, were appropriate and applied appropriately? Does he really think that those people envisioned that, 50 years later, that would mean we could not deport a rapist because he would not get adequate healthcare in the country that we were deporting him to?
The article has been totally distorted from its original purpose, and the question of whether we can operate a safe and decent framework of rights in this country without the use of the ECHR is quite clearly scaremongering. Canada manages it, New Zealand manages it, Australia manages it. They all manage to have a framework of rights and international agreements, and that includes Canada, which is seeking a closer relationship with the EU, which is not part of the ECHR.