UK: Imminent Immigration Bill is 'politics as performance not problem solving'

Responding to a flurry of Government announcements concerning the introduction of an Immigration and Asylum Bill on Tuesday, Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK's Refugee and Migrant Rights Director, said:

"The introduction of yet more immigration legislation in the final days of Keir Starmer's premiership, just before summer recess, will be a bitter disappointment for anyone hoping for a genuinely new direction from government.

"The Bill and a series of recent immigration announcements continue down a path laid by successive governments: reducing legal constraints on Home Office decision-making while making the immigration and asylum system increasingly punitive for migrants and refugees.

"Several proposals are deeply alarming: from attempts to weaken protections for families and sideline long-established human rights obligations, to plans for a Home Office-controlled appeals system without legally qualified judges, and proposals to warehouse people seeking safety in mass barrack-style accommodation centres, deny them the right to work, and then present them with a bill for it.

"Access to justice and the rule of law are not inconveniences to be worked around. Protections against torture, family separation and arbitrary state power are values this country has upheld for generations. Yet this government appears willing to cast them aside in pursuit of political headlines.

"This is politics as performance, not problem-solving. Abandoning principles that should never be negotiable, including by seeking to weaken the protections guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, is weakness, not leadership.

"Whoever the new Prime Minister is, if they truly want a reset, then dignity, fairness and hope must be for everyone. Britain needs a new politics that rejects scapegoating and appeasement and returns to the values of justice, humanity and equal dignity."