UK to consider sending asylum seekers abroad

[CULLINAN]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56439093

[secret.simon]

It looks like the changes to the asylum rules will incorporated into primary legislation (Act of Parliament), rather than in ministerial secondary legislation (Rules/Regulations/Orders). The latter can be challenged in court, the former can't be.

No.10 confirms the Queen’s Speech will contain bills to “improve the building safety regulatory regime, reform our asylum system and to repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act”.

Given that the State Opening is scheduled for mid-May 2021, I would expect any primary legislation on asylum rules to take about a year (so approximately March-May 2022) to get through both Houses and become law.

I would expect the proposals to get through the Commons easily as the government has a pretty good majority there. The likely parliamentary battleground will be the House of Lords which tends to be very involved in detailed technical discussions about the law, rather than the political overview approach of the Commons.

Baroness Deech, a crossbench/non-party member and law professor, has written a very useful guide on how to lobby members of the House of Lords, if anybody reading this wishes to lobby them.

As the article makes clear, sending a mass of identical emails will most likely just get you blocked. What anybody who wants to argue against the Bill/proposals would want to do is to identify any members of the House of Lords who may be sympathetic to asylum-seekers and email them their own arguments and/or personal stories in their own words, rather than using a standard identitikit leter/email.

As an aside, sending asylum-seekers to other safe countries is not an unknown practice. Australia has been doing this for about two decades, with refugees arriving by boat in Australia being moved to Nauru (a small country in the Pacific) and Papua New Guinea (an independent country just off the coast of Australia), while their asylum applications are processed.