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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

moved Amendment No. 114F: 114F: Clause 129, leave out Clause 129 The noble Lord said: My Lords, when these clauses were discussed in Committee, the Minister acknowledged that the special immigration status they create was cooked up primarily to reverse the decisions of the High Court and the Court of Appeal in relation to a few desperate people who escaped from almost certain torture and death in Afghanistan while it was ruled by the Taliban, by hijacking an Ariana Airlines plane and compelling the pilot to fly with all 156 people and crew on board to Stansted. Originally 11 of the people on board were charged with offences connected with that operation, but one was found unfit to plead. After a first trial at which the jury failed to agree, the remaining 10 were retried. One was acquitted. Although he cannot be designated as a foreign criminal, he still has not had a decision on his asylum claim after eight years. I invite the Minister to explain how this delay has occurred. The remaining nine were convicted at their second trial and given light sentences because of mitigating circumstances. The accused were members of the young intellectual organisation, which had been penetrated by the Taliban. Four of their fellow members had been arrested and tortured and had disclosed the names of 35 people who had met in Kabul to discuss extending their activities to Herat and Kandahar. Those 35 included the people on this plane. The nine appealed, and in June 2003 the Court of Appeal quashed the sentences on the grounds that the jury had been misdirected on the defence of duress. By that time the application for asylum that they had lodged had already been refused by the panel of adjudicators, as the noble Lord, Lord West, told me in his letter of 20 March, on the grounds that they had committed a serious non-political crime outside the country of their origin and were therefore excluded from the protection of the refugee convention under Article 1F The nine then succeeded in their application for judicial review of the refusal in the Administration Court and again in the Court of Appeal. They were granted limited leave to remain in May 2006, which expired in November of that year, but when they applied for extensions, the Secretary of State simply failed to respond from that day to this, keeping them in limbo. What had been decided was to put these clauses together so that these persons, and the very small number in a similar situation, could be deprived of the rights they had successfully asserted in the courts. In Committee, the Minister said that the issue was what status should be accorded to a person whose actions were such as to warrant his deportation, but who cannot be removed because to do so would be contrary to our ECHR obligations. The simple answer is that his limited leave to remain should be renewed six months at a time until it either becomes safe for him to return, or it is perverse to keep him and his family in limbo. Personally, I think that after eight years there is no good reason of public policy for saying that we ought to keep these particular families in a state of suspended animation, nor was there any attempt by the Minister to make out such a case in our previous debate. But I accept that there might be circumstances in which an even longer period would be needed to decide whether it was safe for a person to return, and that is already covered by the provision that limited leave to remain could be renewed indefinitely, although with a 10-year review. When it comes to the families of these people, the Minister says that it is normal for family members to be granted leave in line, and that it would be illogical for someone whose application for leave to remain rides on the coat-tails of another—as he put it—to end up in a better position than someone wearing the coat. I accept that, in the normal case where the end result is either refusal or acceptance, but at the point where the principal applicant is consigned to special immigration status, I believe that dependants, who have done none of the acts specified in Article 1F or to warrant this pariah treatment, should be given the normal six months leave to remain. In the case of children, perhaps the Minister can say whether he has considered whether this policy is compatible with the draft code of practice under Section 21 of the UK Borders Act, now coming to the end of the consultation period, to say nothing of our obligations under the CRC. I was going to give details of what is happening in the particular cases of the wives and children but as the hour is very late I will simply say that there has been one case of judicial review and another is pending eight years after these people arrived in the United Kingdom. Unfortunately, the treatment of the wives and children has not been in accordance with our normal standards of human rights and justice. This is another example of the Government’s habit of changing the law when they do not like the decisions of the courts. The effect of their policy, as set out in Part 10 of the Bill, is to destroy the prospects of a small group of people who had already suffered appalling human rights violations at the hands of a vicious gang of bigoted religious fanatics whom our Government took military action to remove. The clauses in Part 10 fulfil an undertaking given by Jack Straw when they first arrived here expecting to live in peace and freedom. They have been severely disappointed but if we remove these clauses we can give them some future life. I beg to move.