Suella Braverman has denied the government is breaking the law with its immigration proposals, despite telling Conservatives there was a more than 50% chance the plans may be incompatible with the European convention on human rights.
The home secretary also struggled to clarify whether the Olympian Sir Mo Farah would have been deported as soon as he turned 18 years old under the proposed regulations, or why he would not have been deported, as he was trafficked to the UK aged nine.
Under the plans, asylum seekers arriving in the UK via small boats will be detained and deported. Braverman and Rishi Sunak have claimed the measures will successfully deter people from crossing the Channel. However, neither the home secretary nor the prime minister have been able to set out details on new detention facilities to accommodate the detained refugees or when people will be able to be deported to Rwanda.
Unveiling the plans to Conservatives, Braverman admitted the illegal migration bill was “more than 50%” likely to break human rights laws. The UN refugee agency said it was “profoundly concerned” by the bill’s provisions, which would give the government the right to criminalise, detain and deport asylum seekers, saying it would be a “clear breach of the refugee convention”.
“We’re not breaking the law, and no government representative has said that we’re breaking the law,” Braverman told Sky News. “In fact, we’ve made it very clear that we believe we’re in compliance with all of our international obligations, for example the refugee convention, the European convention on human rights, other conventions to which we are subject.
“They are breaking our laws, they are abusing the generosity of the British people and we now need to ensure that they are deterred from doing that.”
The asylum backlog is spiralling, with a record 166,000 people waiting for a decision to be made on their applications. But Braverman could not say when the first asylum seekers would be deported under the new plans, or when more detention centres would be built as capacity to keep refugees was already stretched.
Sunak told a Downing Street press conference that people arriving in the UK illegally would be removed “within weeks” and that the bill would apply “retrospectively” if passed.
Braverman told Sky News: “We are rolling out new detention spaces. I’m not going to give precise dates because we’ve got logistical challenges that we’re always overcoming … But very, very soon we will be expanding our detention capacity to meet the the need.”
When asked whether Farah would have been deported under the proposals, initially Braverman swerved the question and told Sky: “Well, as I said, we are very proud of our world-leading modern slavery regime. We’ve got world-leading protections on human trafficking, proud of protections the Conservative government have put in place to protect genuine victims of modern slavery.”
When pressed again, Braverman added: “We have very lawful … for people who are genuine victims of modern slavery.”
The contentious bill will introduce an annual cap, to be decided by parliament, on the number of refugees the UK will offer sanctuary to through safe and legal routes – but only once the boats have been stopped.
Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer are braced for a tense clash in the Commons after Labour described the proposed policy as a “con” that was no more likely to be successful than previous Tory efforts to tackle migration.
The shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper, told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think that they are being irresponsible in the way they’re doing this. Time and again they go for the gimmicks, they go for the rhetoric, they ramp up the debate on this, but they don’t actually solve the problem.”
She said Labour would also tackle the small boats issue, but the party was concerned by the policies that a Conservative government would leave behind.
The TV presenter Gary Lineker described the Tories’ latest plan to imprison asylum seekers entering the UK as “beyond awful”.
Lineker, who welcomed a second refugee into his Surrey home in October last year, tweeted a video of Braverman saying: “Enough is enough. We must stop the boats.” He responded: “Good heavens, this is beyond awful.”
Braverman said his comments were “disappointing and unhelpful”. She told the BBC: “I think it’s unhelpful to compare our measures, which are lawful, proportionate and indeed compassionate, to 1930s Germany. I also think that we are on the side of the British people here.
“It’s plain for anyone to see that the British people have had enough of this situation of thousands of people coming here illegally at huge cost to the taxpayer and undermining our laws, and, in fact, British generosity.”
