Suella Braverman is in Washington DC today. She is there to deliver a speech in which she will claim that there needs to be a major overhaul of the UN Refugee Convention.
Braverman will argue that fearing discrimiation on the basis of being gay or a woman is not a good enough reason to claim asylum.
According to The Times:
The home secretary will set out her case for a major overhaul of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, which has been signed by 146 countries and gradually incorporated into UK case law over the past seven decades.
Speaking in Washington at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank, she will argue for a narrower definition of the term “refugee”. She will also say that the convention is outdated and “we now live in a completely different time”.
Braverman will warn that the way in which asylum seekers “shop around” for their “preferred destination” in Europe is “absurd and unsustainable” and that nobody who crosses the Channel in a small boat should be treated as a refugee.
Her comments are likely to put Britain on another collision course with the UNHCR, which governs the Refugee Convention and has already condemned the government over its Illegal Migration Act and policy to deport illegal migrants to Rwanda.
Braverman’s speech is expected to lay out further detail of Rishi Sunak’s ambition to put Britain at the forefront of attempts to reset international structures for tackling ever-growing migration across the world. The prime minister has previously described the global asylum framework as “obsolete”.
According to figures compiled by the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, 108 million people were forcibly displaced last year as a result of persecution, conflict, violence or human rights violations.
The Centre for Policy Studies, a think tank, has estimated that the way in which courts have interpreted the Refugee Convention has become so broad that it effectively now grants the right for at least 780 million people worldwide to move to another country.
This compares with just 2 million people in Europe who were granted protection by the convention when it was signed in 1951.
Braverman will insist that it is “incumbent upon politicians” to consider whether the Refugee Convention and the way it has been interpreted through the courts, is “fit for our modern age” and to consider the case for reform.
Braverman cites Article 1 of the convention, which defines the term “refugee” as applying to those who have a “well-founded fear” of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion and who cannot safely reside in the country of their nationality.
She argues that through case law, the threshold for granting protection under the convention has moved away from “persecuted” towards “something more akin to a definition of ‘discrimination’”.
There has also been a similar shift away from a “well-founded fear” towards a “credible” or “plausible fear”, Braverman says. This has resulted in a significant expansion in the number of those who may qualify for asylum and an ever lower threshold.
“Let me be clear, there are vast swathes of the world where it is extremely difficult to be gay, or to be a woman,” the home secretary will say.
“Where individuals are being persecuted, it is right that we offer sanctuary. But we will not be able to sustain an asylum system if, in effect, simply being gay or a woman and fearful of discrimination in your country of origin is sufficient to qualify for protection.”
