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The government has come in for a certain amount of criticism about its deal to allow migrants who arrive in the UK illegally to be sent to Rwanda for assessment of their asylum applications.
Priti Patel’s Rwanda asylum plan has been challenged in Parliament by Theresa May, who questions its ‘legality, practicality, and efficacy’, as well as its potential for increasing the trafficking of women and children. The legality of the scheme, which proposes to send those with rejected UK asylum claims to Rwanda, has been defended by Patel, who points to immigration rules introduced last year. However, the backlash has now infiltrated the Home Office itself, with staff threatening to go on strike over concerns of illegality and racism. This prompted the permanent secretary, Matthew Rycroft, to reassure the civil service that implementing it would not be ‘racist or illegal’. Rycroft himself, however, doubts whether the plan would provide taxpayer value for money, and has refused to sign it off.
The United Kingdom and other NATO allies have begun ramping up arms deliveries to Ukraine to assist them in the ongoing conflict against Russia. Deliveries of hitherto purely ‘defensive’ weapons systems will now be bolstered by armoured vehicles and long-range artillery. The UK has also provided cutting edge portable Starstreak air defence systems to Ukraine, with a verified report on Saturday confirming that a Russian helicopter had already been destroyed by the system. The Starstreak system is developed by Belfast-based Thales Air Defence Limited, which specialises in short-range air defence weapons. Starstreak launchers can be shoulder-mounted, attached to a vehicle, or fired from a ground launcher, but the UK has only sent units of the shoulder-mounted version to aid rapid deployment. These weapons follow lethal aid already sent to Ukraine by the UK, including over 4,000 Swedish made NLAWs and some US produced Javelin missiles, both powerful anti-tank weapons capable of destroying heavily armoured Russian main battle tanks.
On Monday, the Independent reported on the words of the Minister for Brexit Opportunities and Government Efficiency of the United Kingdom, Jacob Rees-Mogg. Having earlier tweeted a graph demonstrating that the UK had sanctioned a higher amount of Russian-owned assets in pound-terms than the US or the EU, Labour and Lib Dem politicians responded by pointing out that the graph better demonstrated the UK’s role in storing and laundering money for highly questionable individuals from Russia and elsewhere. Despite the calls for transparency from, for instance, the president of Estonia long before the invasion of Ukraine, the UK and its territories have remained a bastion for billions of pounds of poorly identified foreign wealth, with large numbers of expensive houses in central London standing empty while house prices soar and the number of homeless grows.
On Friday, the Guardian reported on the earlier Freemovement.org quantitative analysis relating to deprivations of British citizenship. While it has been known and reported upon for some time, the analysis demonstrates a continued trend of increased deprivations, with a significant peak in 2017, when the number of people whose citizenship was removed soared by 600%.
Protected by Article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights following the Second World War, the right to a nationality was described by Hannah Arendt as the very ‘right to have rights’. Nationality underpins individuals’ belonging to states, which can be the only true guarantors of individual self-governance through the medium of inalienable rights.
Prior to 2006, the power to remove citizenship had not been used since 1973. Now, strengthened by the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, which allowed the UK government to order deprivation of citizenship against its citizens where it believes it is ‘conducive to the public good’, 175 people have had their citizenship removed on national security grounds, and 286 due to fraud (even though the latter power relating to fraud was already enshrined in s.40 of the British Nationality Act 1981). The additional power to render individuals stateless was introduced by the Immigration Act 2014, under which the Secretary of State may remove citizenship where she has reasonable grounds for believing that the person deprived ‘is able’ to become a national of another country. This was most visibly achieved in the case of Shamima Begum, considered extensively on the UK Human Rights Blog.
On Tuesday, the Ministry of Justice published its full consultation (the ‘Consultation’) on Human Rights Act (the ‘Act’) reform. The Consultation criticises the current application of the Act in the UK and sets out the government’s proposals for repealing the Act and replacing it with a UK Bill of Rights. The 123-page Consultation follows the Independent Human Rights Act Review (‘IHRAR’), which reported to the government in late October, and was published on the government website on the same day as the Consultation.
The Consultation runs through the government’s now familiar issues with the Act, putting significant weight on cherry picked human rights cases which it is eager to summarise in its own words. For instance, R (Ellis) v Chief Constable of the Essex Police 7 [2003] EWHC 1321 (Admin), [2003] 2 FLR 566 is cited in the Consultation as an example of the application of the Act going ‘too far’. The Consultation presents the issue in the case, of Essex police publicising photographs of convicted offenders in train stations, as one that should clearly be beyond the remit of the Act. It makes no mention of the children and relatives of the offenders whose interests were balanced with the interests of the public in naming and shaming offenders in the hopes of deterring further crime (in the end, the scheme was permitted to continue).
The Sunday Times, now committed to its campaign to change the law on assisted dying, has shared the story of Len and Karen Williamson, who spent £45,000 travelling to Switzerland with the assistance of private ambulances and a private flight, in order for Karen to elect the timing of her own death. Physician assisted suicide remains illegal in the UK, with the Suicide Act 1961 (which simultaneously legalised suicide) rendering liable those who aid, abet or procure the suicide of another to fourteen years’ imprisonment. Repeated challenges have been made against this law, with the most prominent being the leading case of Nicklinson & Anor R (on the application of) (Rev 1) [2014] UKSC 38. A nine-judge Supreme Court rejected the application of Tony Nicklinson, who was paralysed from the neck down and who described his life as a ‘living nightmare’, refusing to issue a declaration of incompatibility under s.4 of the Human Rights Act (see Rosalind English’s post on that decision.) This would have rendered the blanket ban on physician assisted suicide incompatible with the article 8 right to private and family life. Instead, the court expressly left the difficult decision up to Parliament. Since then, the Supreme Court has reaffirmed its position in the case of Noel Conway. Conway’s earlier Court of Appeal decision was considered in full on the UK Human Rights Blog.
Now, there appears to be some new hope for advocates of the right to die, a movement which (where the terminally ill are concerned) is supported by over 90% of the UK population. Baroness Meacher’s Assisted Dying Bill has now reached its second reading in the House of Lords, though it has a long way to go yet. The new Bill would permit attending doctors to provide medicines that would bring about the end of the lives of patients with a committed wish to die, where they are mentally competent and within six months of natural death. They would not be permitted to administer the medicines themselves (potentially leaving out individuals with locked-in syndrome who are not able even to swallow). Parliamentary intervention, strongly recommended by the Commission on Assisted Dying in 2012, would go some way towards curing the unprincipled approaches the courts have been forced to take in tragic cases such as Airedale NHS Trust v Bland [1993] UKHL 17 and A (Children), Re [2000] EWCA Civ 254, two cases which legalised the removal of life support by doctors, and the killing by separation of conjoined twins whose lives are parasitic upon and deadly for their stronger siblings, respectively.
Incels metaphorically ‘take the black pill’ (a reference to the film The Matrix) when they believe they are no longer capable of change
In the news:
Hundreds of people attended the funeral services for Sophie and Lee Martyn on Monday, killed last month by Jake Davison, who was active on ‘incel’ or ‘involuntary celibate’ forums (though not describing himself as one). Over 50 people, including the five gunned down by Davison in Plymouth have now been killed by incels across the Anglophone world, who blame women for their own perceived lack of sexual and social status. Incel ideology has been linked to the far right, with obsessions over male appearance and phrenology. Biological determinism defines their beliefs in their inability to find sexual partners, which, when poured into online melting-pots already occupied by anti-feminists and white supremacists, can enflame similar senses of entitlement and injustice that may consume disaffected and reclusive (generally white) men.
In 2018, Amia Srinivasan posed the question in The London Review of Books:
how to dwell in the ambivalent place where we acknowledge that no one is obligated to desire anyone else, that no one has a right to be desired, but also that who is desired and who isn’t is a political question, a question usually answered by more general patterns of domination and exclusion.
On Thursday, the Crown Prosecution Service announced that they would no longer prosecute migrants uninvolved in any criminal activity other than illegal entry to the UK. The development, supported by the notion that these cases can be better dealt with by administrative deportation than by prison overcrowding, is being widely reported as a blow to the Home Secretary’s Tuesday announcement of the Nationality and Borders Bill. The Bill seeks to further differentiate between migrants who enter the UK illegally and those who do not. Significant changes introduced by the new legislation are the increase of the maximum sentence for illegal entry from six months to twelve, introduced at clause 37, and the removal of protections for migrants who are escorted to the UK by the Border Force, who currently technically enter the country legally. The Bill will require that migrants have prior authorisation to enter the country to avoid entering illegally. How the CPS guidance, apparently adopted after ‘close consultation with the Home Office’ will interact with the new law, if passed, remains to be seen.
The arrest of opposition activist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega in Minsk last Sunday, following the forced grounding of Ryanair flight FR4978 from Athens to Vilnius has captured headlines this week. Mr Protasevich is a former editor of Nexta, an online dissident group with the most popular Telegram messaging channel in Belarus. Nexta produces online content in a similar style to that of Russian activist Alexei Navalny, uncovering corruption in Europe’s last dictatorship.
Although state-run Belarussian TV initially claimed that the plane had requested the diversion to Minsk, a later transcript was shown in which air traffic controllers told the pilot that there was a bomb on board the plane. A Russian-bought MiG fighter jet escorted the plane to Minsk airport, where Mr Protasevich and Miss Sapega were detained. Belarus is the last country in Europe to impose the death penalty, and the inclusion of Mr Protasevich on a KGB list of terrorist suspects (for which the death penalty applies in Belarus) has sparked fears over his sentencing. However, he has so far only been charged with organising mass unrest for his coverage of the 2020 election (widely known to have been rigged). The Committee to Protect Journalists records the murders of six journalists in Belarus since 1994, when Alexander Lukashenko became dictator. Self-exiled opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, who entered politics herself after the arrest of her journalist husband, has reported that she believes Mr Protasevich (who suffers from heart disease) may currently be in hospital following heart complications.
Estonia’s president, Kersti Kaljulaid, has reiterated her pleas for the UK to take a tougher stance on money entering the country from corrupt regimes, whereafter it is dissipated through the London financial sector. She first requested the UK make needed changes after the attempted murders of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in 2018 by FSB agents. While the government has stated it will take action, there is not yet any evidence of fresh safeguards to prevent money flowing through the UK system. The UK, which already sanctions Belarus, is now preparing to discuss further sanctions in tandem with EU leaders.
On Friday, former Home Secretary Lord Blunkett raised his issues with the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, an enormous piece of legislation that reforms much existing legislation and common law offences. Lord Blunkett pointed to the difficulties the police could face in interpreting the new law, and the sensitive nature of the relationship between the police and protestors. The Bill is currently at the Committee Stage of Parliamentary procedure. Particular attention has been drawn to s.59 of the Bill, which purportedly codifies the common law offence of public nuisance, following the recommendations of the Law Commission’s 2015 report, Simplification of Criminal Law: Public Nuisance and Outraging Public Decency. This section would create an offence of ‘intentionally or recklessly causing public nuisance’, defined as where a person’s act or omission causes serious harm to the public or a section of the public. Subsection (2) states that this offence can be constituted where ‘a person’ suffers ‘serious distress, serious annoyance, serious inconvenience or serious loss of amenity’. On indictment, a defendant is liable to imprisonment for a term up to ten years. While the Law Commission’s recommendation that the fault element should be intention or recklessness as opposed to ‘knew or should have known’ was adopted, the significant maximum term is a new addition.
The UK has seen an increasingly falling rate in arrests and prosecutions for cannabis possession over recent years, as police forces no longer see the point in enforcement. The Liberal Democrats have campaigned for its legalisation since 2016, and the first medically-prescribed cannabis was permitted in the UK in 2018. However, crucial NHS cannabis-based medicines for epilepsy remained prohibitively difficult to access for another year, with the majority of self-reported ‘medicinal’ users still turning to the black market. With growing numbers of US states, alongside Canada and South Africa decriminalising recreational use over the past three years, some UK MPs believe that cannabis legalisation will occur in the UK within five to ten years.
For several years, China has been enacting a policy of repression and brainwashing against over a million Uyghur Muslims in its northwest Xinjiang province. Reports include instances of forced sterilisation. Its hundreds of ‘re-education’ camps have been revealed as places where contact with relatives, the ability to pray and even when to use the toilet are tightly controlled. A leaked document reveals the state’s use of algorithms to score inmates on a ‘behaviour-modification’ points system, which tells guards when to mete out rewards and punishments. Absent from their homes, Uyghur places of worship are secretly bulldozed en masse.
On Tuesday, the UK government announced new rules that seek to prevent UK companies profiting from forced Uyghur labour. Companies will have to demonstrate that their supply chains are free from slavery. Public procurement rules will also attempt to exclude suppliers with links to human rights violations. This new policy appears to implement Key Proposal no. 5 of the newly created China Research Group, a think tank set up by Tory MPs to ‘counter violations of international universal human rights’. The ERG-style group was formed after China’s coronavirus cover-up operation became clear.
On Thursday, Harry Dunn’s family were granted permission to appeal against the High Court ruling handed down on 24 November, which held in no uncertain terms that Mrs Sacoolas did enjoy diplomatic immunity at the time she killed 19 year-old Harry Dunn while driving on the wrong side of the road in August of last year. The US state department has refused to waive her immunity under Article 32 of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, stating that to allow the waiver, and thereby the extradition request that would inevitably follow would set an “extraordinarily troubling precedent”. The arrests of diplomats Michael Kovrig in China and Rob Macaire in Iran over the last year highlight the continued importance of the inviolability of diplomatic agents serving abroad. However, where there has been an unlawful killing by a family member of an agent, natural inclinations of justice are upset by the failure of a longstanding diplomatic ally to simply do the right thing.
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