In its 4th Report of Session
2023–24, the cross-party House of Lords Secondary Legislation
Scrutiny Committee considered the draft Nationality, Immigration
and Asylum Act 2002 (Amendment of List of Safe States)
Regulations 2024 and raised concerns about the lack of key
information on a policy intended to tackle unfounded protection
and human rights claims.
The draft Regulations would add India and Georgia to the list of
‘safe states’, as defined in immigration legislation. This would
mean that any asylum or human rights claim made by a national
from these countries must be declared inadmissible, unless
‘exceptional circumstances’ apply.
The Committee’s report notes that several sources, including the
US Department of State and the Home Office itself, have reported
“significant” and “widespread” human rights abuses in these two
countries. However, the Home Office stated that the tests for
designating a country as safe included that “in general” there is
no serious risk of persecution of nationals of that state. The
Home Office argued that, despite some “isolated incidents”, these
tests were met by India and Georgia.
The report raised the question of what would constitute
‘exceptional circumstances’ in the case of nationals from these
countries, thus allowing their asylum or human rights claims to
be considered. The Home Office stated that guidance on this point
will be published “in due course”. However, the Committee
considered that the operation of ‘exceptional circumstances’ is
critical to understanding and scrutinising the policy and further
details should have been in the legislation or, at a minimum, the
guidance should have been published alongside the instrument.
In conclusion, the report draws the draft Regulations to the
special attention of the House and suggests that the House can
only scrutinise these Regulations properly if the guidance is
published before the debate on them takes place.
, Member of the
Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, said:
“We have often made clear that it is important to provide all
supporting information at the time an instrument is laid before
Parliament. In the case of these draft Regulations, the guidance
on ‘exceptional circumstances’ is so critical to their operation
that effective scrutiny is impossible without understanding how
this aspect will work.
“More generally, we observe that there is scope for different
points of view on whether India and Georgia are ‘safe states’,
based on their human rights records. In the case of Georgia, we
note that a significant proportion of asylum applications are
granted (29% in the year to September 2022 and 16% in the year to
September 2023).
“The Home Office has also not provided any clarity on whether
the significant backlog of existing asylum claims from nationals
of these countries will continue to be processed as previously or
will be deemed inadmissible retrospectively.
“Overall, we found the explanatory material laid with the
draft Regulations did not provide a clear enough picture of how
they would be implemented in practice.”
