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Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

moved Amendment No. 45: 45: Clause 129, page 98, line 1, leave out subsection (5) and insert— ““(5) Conditions 1, 2 or 3 shall not be satisfied unless the Secretary of State certifies that the person constitutes a danger to the community.”” The noble Lord said: My Lords, we come to the special immigration status which is dealt with in Part 10 of the Bill. If I may, I will first get it on the record that the amendments that were moved in Committee and on Report were not for the exclusive benefit of the Afghans but for everybody who is to be consigned indefinitely to the special immigration status defined in this part of the Bill. We were concentrating mainly on the Afghans because they were the people on whom we had detailed information. Of the other 38 people who are likely to be designated under the special immigration status, their cases were not in the public domain. The Minister raised the curtain briefly to allow us to glimpse the particular case of Mr A of the Justice and Equality Movement in Darfur who may, or may not, come under Article 1F. But neither he nor Mr B, a former member of the AWB in South Africa, had been tried. In the case of Mr A, the ““serious reasons for believing”” that he had done any of the specified acts in the exclusions appeared to rest on his standing in the JEM, which had committed war crimes in Darfur. It is an extension of Article 1F to say that it is going to apply to every single individual who is taking part in an organisation that has been labelled as having committed war crimes. My approach today is not to cross swords with the Minister on the interpretation of the convention of one Act in particular, but to try to see if we can reach an accommodation by looking at this status from a common-sense point of view. A person who is designated will be denied the right to work and access to mainstream benefits—to the end of his life in many cases, because the situation in his country of origin will make it impossible for him ever to be returned for ECHR reasons. That may continue not just for a few years but, as we see from looking at the examples—particularly for the Afghans—more or less into the indefinite future. These amendments say that in passing this indeterminate sentence, the Secretary of State will have to consider whether the person constitutes a danger to the community in this country. If not, he is able—as we have discussed already on two occasions—to grant six months’ leave to remain. That can be renewed from time to time, until a final decision can be made. But after a number of years, when it becomes clear that there is no prospect whatever of returning the person, and even more that he has become settled in the UK with a wife and children who would also be exempted from designation by these amendments, it would be reasonable to grant him indefinite leave to remain. The Minister said that, in the case of the Afghans, although the wives were to be treated in line with the principal applicant, it was open to them to apply for asylum separately. As he knows, they have done so without getting responses for several years. Meanwhile, children have been born here and, in many cases, have acquired British citizenship. The longer the families are here, the closer their ties with the UK and the more intolerable it would be to pack them off to Afghanistan, or wherever, in the improbable event that circumstances there would make it possible for them to be returned without ECHR risk. I beg to move.