The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill has cleared its first major hurdle in the House of Lords.
Peers voted 206 to 84, majority 122, against a motion designed to block it.
After the Lib Dem-sponsored bid to halt the Bill was rejected, peers gave it a second reading on the nod without the House dividing for a second vote.
It came after the Archbishop of Canterbury warned Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda deportation plan is “leading the nation down a damaging path” and the Equality and Human Rights Commission warned the bill risks the UK breaching its obligations under international law.
The archbishop was was among some 66 members of the House of Lords listed to speak during the second reading debate of the UK Government’s bill.
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The inhumane draft legislation seeks to address the legal challenges which have dogged the plan and gives ministers the power to ignore emergency injunctions.
In a withering rebuke to the scheme to send asylum seekers who cross the Channel in small boats on a one-way flight to Kigali, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby accused the UK Government of outsourcing the country’s “legal and moral responsibilities”.
The top Anglican cleric also argued “a pick-and-choose approach to international law” undermined the UK’s global standing as he signalled he may seek to block the policy at a later date.
Speaking during the debate, Welby said: “We can, as a nation, do better than this bill.
“With this bill the Government is continuing to seek good objectives in the wrong way, leading the nation down a damaging path.”
He added: “We need a wider strategy for refugee policy which involves international co-operation and which equips us for the far greater migration flows, perhaps 10 times greater in the coming decades, as a result of conflict and climate change and poverty. Instead this bill offers only ad hoc one-off approaches.
“Rwanda is a country I know well, it is a wonderful country and my complaint is not with Rwanda, nor with its people. It has overcome challenges that this House cannot begin to imagine.
“But this bill continues, wherever it does it, to outsource our legal and moral responsibilities for refugees and asylum seekers, with other countries far poorer already supporting multitudes more than we are now and to cut back on our aid.”
He said: “The UK should lead internationally as it has in the past, not stand apart.
“A pick-and-choose approach to international law undermines our global standing and offends against the principle of universality that is their increasingly threatened foundation.”
Given the Lords was a revising chamber, Welby said “sadly” he would not back a Liberal Democrat-led move to block the Bill at second reading, although he found the argument made for it “convincing and powerful”.
He pointedly added: “But I think we have to wait until third reading and have done our revising work.”
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Sunak’s Safety of Rwanda Bill survived third reading in the Commons after the Prime Minister saw off a rebellion by the Tory right which had sought to toughen the legislation.
In the end just 11 Conservatives voted against the legislation but it faces a bigger test in the Lords, where many members have expressed unease about the plan.
The Prime Minister urged peers against blocking “the will of the people” by opposing the bill as he faces an election year having made “stopping the boats” a key pledge of his leadership.
Meanwhile, EHRC argued the draft legislation “undermines the universality of human rights” and in doing so “could expose people to harm and breaches of their right to life, their rights to be free from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment and their right to effective remedy”.
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