Lords Committee raises concerns over lack of essential information on immigration law change to declare India and Georgia as ‘safe states’

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.

Baroness Harris of Richmond, 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.”