Home secretary to claim almost 800 million people could claim the right to move to another country under the convention
Labour says Suella Braverman’s speech in Washington today is an indication that she has given up on fixing the “asylum chaos” in the UK. This is the statement that Yvette Cooper, the shadow home secretary, released overnight.
The home secretary has given up on fixing the Tories’ asylum chaos at home so now she’s resorting to grandstanding abroad and looking for anyone else to blame. On her watch, dangerous boat crossings are up, the backlog of undecided cases is at a record high, returns are down by 70% and the taxpayer is now spending an astronomical £8 million a day on hotels – all because the Conservatives have time and again offered cheap gimmicks instead of getting a proper grip.
And instead of enhancing international cooperation to go after the criminal gangs and build long-term solutions, this government has made it harder to get other countries to work with us by undermining international agreements that they still want other countries to abide by and offering no solutions.
It does need to be looked at on an international basis because we’ve seen people use asylum claims who are essentially economic migrants, and we’ve also seen people shopping around between different countries to choose where to claim asylum.
And that’s not how the UN refugee convention was originally designed, it’s not designed to allow people to circulate in Europe for a number of years before deciding where to claim asylum and making dangerous and illegal journeys doing so.
When I was immigration minister, I came across a number of cases when people had claimed to be gay, produced photographs of them and a sort of same-sex partner and it turned out on further investigation it was a sibling, it wasn’t a same-sex partner at all.
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