Queen’s speech 2009: draft immigration bill

By Alan Travis

This 243-page bill was published last week and sets out sweeping reforms to the immigration and asylum system that Labour would enact if they win next year’s general election, as well as consolidating and “simplifying” the 12 major pieces of legislation since the 1971 Immigration Act.

The main reforms include a new concept of temporary, time-limited “permission” to come to Britain, which will replace the five separate categories of those who come to work, study, or visit. Permanent residents will be given permission without any time limits or conditions attached.

It also introduces a new streamlined power of expulsion to replace the current powers of deportation and removal. A new regime for those on immigration bail is to be introduced with restrictions on residence, work, study and access to public funds backed up by reporting and monitoring requirements.

A consultation paper published last week on the future of welfare support for asylum seekers is also expected to lead to measures to encourage those who have no right to be in the country to leave Britain.

Another year, another immigration Bill

Source : Poliblog-Refugee Council

Yet another immigration Bill, the Borders, Citizenship and Immigration Bill, is making its way through Parliament at the moment bringing us up to a whopping total of 8 immigration bills since 1997!  The Government has been working on a simplification project over the past couple of years, trying to codify and simplify all immigration law, but they are running behind schedule and have put forward a Bill containing issues that they consider to be ‘urgent’ before this larger Bill is introduced in October.

However, very few of the issues in this current Bill are urgent.  There are many more pressing issues that the government should be addressing – the plight of destitute asylum seekers, the restrictions on permission to work, the lack of protection safeguards in our borders, the discriminatory voucher system… the list goes on.

The one urgent thing that the Bill does do (and about time too!) is introduce a duty on UKBA staff to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, as is the case for staff working for all other government departments.  Supportive Peers are working hard to convince the government that this should also apply to UKBA staff based overseas, and are probing the Government to find how children’s lives will be improved in practice.

We have many serious concerns about the rest of the Bill.  Our main one is that the Bill is introducing a ‘probationary citizenship’ period as part of a person’s route to citizenship which will increase the time they have to wait to apply for citizenship from 5 years to 6 to 8 years depending on whether they engage in voluntary activity.  Refugees have come to the UK for protection and so should be given permanent residence as soon as they are granted status so they can rebuild their lives in peace and security.  We believe that these extra hurdles being placed in a refugees’ path to citizenship are unnecessary, unfair and unduly harsh, and many supportive Peers are making sure our views are heard in Parliament.

You can read our full Bill Briefing here.

Coroners and Justice Bill

IRR - Some provisions in this vast, unwieldy Bill threaten to undermine still further civil rights and protections, particularly for victims of state violence.

The Coroners and Justice Bill, which had its second reading in the House of Commons on 26 January 2009, is a massive hotchpotch which deals with child pornography, defences to homicide charges and other miscellaneous criminal justice matters as well as with inquests. It attempts to put the law of inquests into modern statutory reform, and for that it has been welcomed by campaigning groups such as INQUEST. But its clauses on secret inquests and on sharing personal information have sparked grave concern, as these proposals perfectly illustrate the drift into a surveillance society in which government officials are entitled to collect and share any and all personal information on us, while shrouding their own operations in secrecy in a policing state.[1]

Secret inquests

Clause 11 of the Bill seeks to reintroduce plans for secret inquests, first proposed in the Counter-Terrorism Bill and thrown out in October 2008 by the House of Lords. It provides that the Secretary of State may certify an investigation into a person’s death, on grounds of national security, diplomatic relations, for the prevention or detection of crime, to protect the safety of a witness or third party, or on general public interest grounds. The effect of certification is to allow a coroner (who, in a ‘certified’ inquest, would have to be a High Court judge) to hold the inquest without a jury and to exclude parties (including family members of the deceased) from hearing the secret evidence.

The coroner would have the power to appoint ‘independent counsel’ (who is clearly not independent, as he or she is appointed by the coroner) to test the secret evidence so as to protect the interests of the deceased and next of kin. A similar system in ‘control order’ cases and in the Special Immigration Appeals Commission, where courts rely on secret evidence to justify deportation to torture states or intolerable restrictions on liberty, has led to huge frustration and constant litigation, and prominent QCs have condemned the special advocate system as legitimising unaccountable and oppressive executive decisions.

Azelle Rodney’s death

Currently, inquests must be held with a jury if a death occurred in prison, police or other state custody, or where death resulted from an injury caused by a police officer on duty. The reluctance of the government to disclose sensitive material has caused massive delays to inquests such as that of Azelle Rodney, who died after being shot six times by armed police in Edgware, north London on 30 April 2005. In August 2007, coroner Andrew Walker, sitting at Hornsey in north London, announced he could not proceed with a full inquest into Mr Rodney’s death because of a large number of redactions – passages crossed out – in police officers’ statements. The redactions were made under the 2000 Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA), which covers information obtained from covert surveillance devices such as telephone tapping or bugs. The proposals would enable intercept evidence to be heard by the coroner – but not by the next of kin or the public.

Speaking in December 2007, Azelle’s mother Susan Alexander expressed her belief that the planned changes would enable her finally to see all the evidence collected by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC). She said: ‘For a long time now I’ve been very frustrated and upset by not being able to see vital evidence about the police shooting of my son … Now that the government agrees that this evidence shouldn’t be withheld from bereaved families like ours, I hope all concerned can act quickly so the evidence is disclosed with minimum delay. None of Azelle’s friends and family can come to terms with his death until everything is out in the open and a full inquest has taken place. Azelle has not had justice and without justice there can be no accountability.’[2] Following the Privy Council’s recommendation in February 2008 that RIPA’s absolute ban on intercept evidence be abolished, and the prime minister’s apparent support for their recommendation, there were grounds for optimism that a more open approach to intercept evidence was on the way. These hopes, so far as inquests are concerned, have been dashed. It does not appear that Azelle’s family will be any the wiser about his death under this Bill – the likelihood is that they, and the public, will be excluded from the inquest, which will be held without a jury. As INQUEST pointed out in its April 2008 briefing on the similar provisions in the Counter-Terrorism Bill: ‘Deaths in custody raise important issues of state power and accountability. In a free and democratic society, deaths in state custody should be subject to particularly close public scrutiny. For this reason it is imperative the inquest system is open and transparent so that justice is seen to be done and public confidence in state bodies is upheld … [the] Clause would give the Secretary of State a key decision making role in the very inquests where the state’s actions require most scrutiny and amounts to excessive political interference in the inquest system.’

Its briefing on the 2009 Bill is even more trenchant, arguing that ‘The proposals amount to a fundamental attack on the independence and transparency of the coronial system in England and Wales; are fundamentally flawed; disconnected from legal principles and have come about without any consultation.’

A further matter of concern is the omission from the Bill of any provision for regular funding of families’ representation at inquests involving deaths in custody. Currently, funding is available only on an exceptional basis, which, as INQUEST points out, means lengthy and frequently intrusive investigations into the means of bereaved families, adding to their distress and grief. The funding gap leads to gross inequality, as police, prison officers and other state officials have banks of expensive lawyers to protect them at inquests and to seek to deflect blame on to the deceased. It also breaches the government’s obligations under European human rights law to ensure that bereaved families have a full opportunity to participate in investigations into deaths at the hands of the state.

Investigation and witness anonymity orders

Another matter of concern arises from the Bill’s provisions for ‘investigating anonymity orders’ and ‘witness anonymity orders’ for those with information useful to police relating to gun and knife crimes in the context of street gangs. These provisions will give police and prosecutors the right to apply to a court for the identity of key witnesses to be kept secret throughout that person’s entire life. Any breach will be punishable by up to five years in jail. The clause is the government’s response to a House of Lords judgment in June 2008 quashing a conviction where the witnesses were anonymous. Justice minister Maria Eagle said she hoped witnesses would feel able to give evidence as a result of the changes. But as the House of Lords acknowledged, in upholding the importance of the common law right to confront one’s accusers, where evidence is received under a ‘veil of secrecy’, the door is left ‘wide open to mendacity, falsehood, and partiality’. The grant of permanent anonymity to informants raises the spectre of wrongful convictions on anonymous evidence motivated by spite or by racism.

Big brother

Clause 152 of the Bill seeks to remove all limits on the use of personal information – including medical, financial and employment records, communications data, by officials. The clause would amend the Data Protection Act so as to allow ministers to make ‘Information sharing orders’ enabling sharing with other agencies and use of information for purposes other than the original one, if this serves a ‘relevant policy objective’. As campaigning group NO2ID says, the clause blows a hole in the data protection legislation. It would permit data swapping between government and the private sector, and with foreign governments. Everything recorded anywhere would potentially be accessible to any official body. In the words of NO2ID, ‘This single clause is as grave a threat to privacy as the entire ID Scheme.’ The clause has been condemned by, among others, the British Medical Association, which say that the data-sharing provisions could deter patients from seeing doctors, GeneWatch, Liberty and the British Computer Society, and is likely to be mauled by the House of Lords, whose Constitution Committee recently expressed concern over the growth of the surveillance society.

Migrants to wait for ten years for Citizenship

(Workpermit.com- Additional Reporting by Elisha Shamba) – Immigrants in Britain now might have to wait for 10 years before they can apply for citizenship with the UK government proposing new tests and a longer probationary period.

The proposals, which were introduced in parliament and expected to be implemented from late 2009, include a new ‘immigration tax’ to help finance the extra pressure that immigrants put on services such as health and education.

However the left-leaning Institute for Public Research yesterday maintained that tough rules on who is allowed to work in the UK will damage the country’s economic recovery.
The economic downturn could be longer and deeper,the think tank said.

Placing restrictions on migrants who plug skills gaps or take jobs which Britons will not perform will damage the economy, researchers said.

The Immigration and Citizenship Bill will end the automatic right to stay after five years’ residence and replace it with “earned citizenship”.

Migrants who can demonstrate a knowledge of English and life in the UK and who carry out voluntary work will have their timetable for citizenship speeded up. The Bill will also place restrictions on migrants’ access to benefits and housing.

Tim Finch, head of the IPPR’s migration team, said: “Migrants become easy targets at times of economic difficulty but introducing yet more tough measures to exclude people could damage our prospects for economic recovery. As it stands, the Borders, Immigration and Citizenship Bill could deter migrants who are in high demand and who are essential for our economy.

“Not all migrants will want to settle in the UK, but some will and so it’s important that the over-complicated process of “earned citizenship” is made more clear and fair.”

He called for a “clear” and “flexible” system for earned citizenship and said it could be unfair to deny benefits to migrants who are working and paying taxes.

IPPR said that the bill needs to address the following issues:

Flexibility: The proposals on so-called “earned citizenship”, along with the new tighter points-based system of managed migration, must be sufficiently flexible to ensure that the UK’s long-term economic need for migrants is met.

Clarity: It is unclear what migrants will be required to do to “earn” citizenship during the so called “probationary period”. To ensure the system is transparent and fair it needs to be clear what contributions to British life are to be considered, how they will be judged and by who.

Fairness: As-yet unspecified restrictions are proposed on migrants’ access to benefits and social housing. However, migrants who have not achieved full citizenship may still be contributing a great deal to the country, and may have raised their families here. Is it fair in these circumstances to deny them a welfare.

A Home Office spokesman said: “The points system will make sure that where we need foreign workers to fill gaps, we can get them. Its flexibility means that we can raise or lower the bar according to the needs of the labour market and the country as a whole. By demanding migrants earn their right to be here, we will ensure only those who make a contribution to Britain can stay in the country.”

Immigration and Citizenship

In 2007, the Government published a consultation document outlining how it proposed to approach the simplification of immigration law.

The document stated that Government would review the content and role of primary legislation, of the Immigration Rules and of the asylum policy instructions and guidance.

On July 14th 2008, the Draft (partial) Immigration and Citizenship Bill was published.

The Refugee Council is concerned that it is only a partial Bill with significant areas such as entitlement to asylum support currently missing from the draft and that it represents a series of missed opportunities, in particular that refugees should be given indefinite permission to remain in the UK the moment that they are recognised as refugees.

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