The Home Secretary is expected to announce major reforms to European human rights laws and modern slavery legislation in an effort to deport more illegal migrants and cut asylum claims.
Shabana Mahmood is considering reforms to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), as well as policies implemented in Denmark, where asylum claims have reached a 40-year low, The i Paper reported.
The plans will be announced on Monday as the Home Office unveils its “most sweeping reforms to tackle illegal migration in modern times”.
Here, The i Paper asks experts whether the proposed measures will cut asylum claims.
Crackdown on right to family life in ECHR
Mahmood’s reforms are likely to include measures to prevent people who have come to the UK illegally from using Article 8 of the ECHR – the right to family life – in order to get their deportations stopped.
Changes would include requiring judges to prioritise public safety over the right to a family life, or the risk that they would face “inhuman” treatment if returned to their home country, The Telegraph reported.
Modern slavery claims will shift to a “one-stop shop” approach requiring an immediate declaration to reduce abuse, according to The Times.
Mihnea Cuibus, a researcher at the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, said it is difficult to assess the effectiveness of the policies without seeing the details, but a “one-stop shop” could help limit claims.
Currently, if the Home Office makes a deportation order for a failed asylum seeker, that person has a lot of “leeway” to make additional submissions, including human rights claims, he said.
Such challenges have become more common, he said.
“There is a bit of an impression at the moment that the UK makes more use of human rights laws than other European countries,” he said.
Alan Manning, a former chair of the Government’s migration advisory committee and an economics professor at the London School of Economics, said he believes “reform of the ECHR is important”.
“On these Article 8 cases, which have sometimes been used to avoid deportation of foreign criminals, the human rights that are protected are often not of the criminal themselves, but of their children and families,” he said.
Danish-style restrictions on family reunions and long stays
A delegation of senior Home Office officials travelled to Copenhagen last month to learn about Denmark’s policies, which include tighter restrictions on family reunion and restricting most refugees to only a temporary stay in the country.
Mahmood has already announced plans to block those granted asylum in the UK from the right to bring their wives, husbands and children to the country.
She has proposed that migrants who want to settle in the UK would face new conditions, including ensuring they learn English to a high standard, work, have a clean criminal record and volunteer in their community.
Manning said not giving immediate family reunification rights would bring the UK more in line with other countries as Britain is currently on the “more generous side”.
Refugees care about family reunion and asylum grant rates, and governments changing these policies can affect migration, Cuibus said.
He added that a key “pillar” of the Danish system, which has not been announced by Mahmood so far, is that those who are granted asylum get temporary residence permits that have to be reviewed every one to two years.
This gives the Government a “chance to revoke protection” if it feels that it is safe for people to return to their country of origin.
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If granting asylum were made temporary, Cuibus said it would arguably be the “most major” change to the UK system.
“The question is, how far is the Government willing to go towards a so-called Danish model?” he said. “Because the conditions in the Danish system are much, much stricter.”
Most people can apply for settlement after eight years in Denmark, but to be eligible, they have tough employment conditions, he said.
They must have been employed for three and a half years out of the last four years, and they are not eligible if they have used any public benefits in the previous three years.
Similar conditions apply to those looking to bring family members over to Denmark.
The UK does not have any “equivalent conditions” now.
Cuibus said it’s “certainly possible” that if the UK applied the same reforms, asylum applications would be reduced, but “the devil is in the detail”.
It is also impossible to determine how much of a role the reforms played in reducing asylum claims in Denmark, he said, because it is unknown how many asylum applications would have been made under its old system pre-2016 or whether any other factors played a role in the decline.
Manning said there is not enough evidence to conclusively determine how effective the Government’s policies will be but he said they could play a role in bringing down claims and appeals.
“I personally think that the way they’re moving is the right direction,” he said.
Other challenges to making a Danish model work in the UK
Cuibus warned there are challenges to applying Danish-style reforms to the UK, as well as other “big factors” that influence the number of asylum claims and cannot be changed by immigration policies.
Violence and political instability in other countries push people to seek asylum, while the UK attracts migrants because of its existing large diasporas and networks, colonial ties and its use of the English language, he said.
Manning said the behaviour of neighbouring countries could also play a role.
He said a drop in asylum claims in Denmark could have been influenced by countries like Sweden having more generous immigration policies.
Leaving the EU has also made it harder for the UK to manage the flow of migrants because it has lost access to information about previous movements and claims in Europe, he added.
“There’s no magic solution here, which makes this all just go away from the Government’s perspective,” Manning said. “These aren’t the big factors that influence the flows. Obviously, the big drivers are conflict elsewhere in the world and so on. But I think these are the tools that the Government has at its disposal.”
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