On 2nd March 2022, the House of Lords debated the Nationality and Borders Bill in the second day of the report stage. The Bishop of Durham spoke on several amendments to the bill, including:
- Amendment 35, which would prevent offshoring of asylum seekers
- Amendments 40-45, moved by the Bishop of Durham on behalf of the Bishop of Gloucester, which relate to the standard of proof applied to vulnerable people seeking asylum
- Amendments 48 & 49, which would promote more safe routes for asylum seekers and targets for resettlement
The Lord Bishop of Durham: My Lords, in rising to support Amendment 35 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Kirkhope, to which I have added my name, I declare my interests in relation to both RAMP and Reset and set out in the register. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Stroud, for the way she introduced this amendment, and I fully support all her points.
I set out my reasons for supporting this amendment in Committee. However, a significant concern for me now is that the Minister was not able to give assurance that children in families would be excluded from offshoring, nor that families would not be split up in the process. This is deeply concerning. I appreciate that the policy document of 25 February sets out that exemptions will depend on the country where people are being offshored and tat publicising exemptions will fuel the movement of the most vulnerable not subject to offshoring.
However, I would set out that, for children, onward movement to any country after an often traumatic journey to the UK, in addition to the trauma in their country of origin, is simply never in their best interests. All the concerns I set out in my Committee speech regarding the monitoring of the practice of offshoring processing centres are especially true for children.
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