Lord German (LD)

My Lords, I must start with what may have been a slip of the tongue from the noble Baroness, Lady Maclean, when she talked about safeguarding this country’s conditions and living standards. In so doing, she mentioned the established Church. I have to say once more that it is the established Church in England; it was disestablished in Wales, and there is the Episcopalian Church in Scotland and so on. If we are trying to protect the nature of our society in its broadest context, we have to recognise that we are very diverse. We are diverse in religion, across nationalities and across language and diverse in all sorts of other ways as well. As a country, we should celebrate that diversity no matter where it comes. This amendment introduces what I would call an inflexible barrier to protection based solely on the timing of a person’s religious conversion. The long-established principle in our asylum system is that claims must be evaluated strictly on their merits. Amendment 79E mandates a blanket refusal based on a characteristic—post-arrival religious conversion—rather than considering the genuine risks of persecution faced by that individual on return. We must focus ourselves on this matter. Adopting such a provision would also place the United Kingdom in breach of our obligations under the refugee convention, which is built on core principles including non-penalisation, non-discrimination and non-refoulement. The timing of religious conversion is a deeply personal matter. If a court or tribunal determines that a person genuinely holds a religious belief, established after arrival in this country, the removal of that belief protection solely because of when the conversion occurred would undermine the foundational commitment to non-refoulement. We must resist the temptation to attempt to fundamentally change the interpretation of the convention by unilateral domestic legislation—an approach which has rightly been scrutinised elsewhere. We should not tie the hands of the courts and decision-makers by removing their ability to grant protection in cases where genuine risk of persecution has been proven, merely because the threat arises from faith adopted while seeking sanctuary here. For those reasons, we therefore uphold the principle that justice demands we look at the substance of the persecution claims regardless of when the circumstances giving to rise to them developed.