Recommendation 94

The Illegal Migration Act 2023 (IMA) introduced significant changes to the UK’s asylum system. In summary, it imposed a duty on the Secretary of State to make arrangements to remove any person who enters the UK irregularly and has not come directly from a territory where their life and liberty was threatened (which includes anyone who has stopped in or passed through a safe country). The asylum claim of any such individual would be declared inadmissible. In the absence of lawful routes to enter the UK in order to make an asylum claim, and given the requirement that an individual be within the UK in order to make such a claim, the IMA effectively prohibited the substantial majority of asylum seekers from having their claim for asylum considered in the UK. The intention behind the Bill was for those claims to be considered instead in a third country, with only Rwanda being identified as a country that would fulfil this function. The fall of the Rwanda policy thus removed any realistic possibility of the IMA’s approach to asylum being practicable. The JCHR published a critical report on the Illegal Migration Bill, concluding that it “breaches a number of the UK’s international human rights obligations and risks breaching others.”132 The significant majority of the IMA has not yet been brought into force.