Home secretary Shabana Mahmood could struggle to get her reforms to asylum tribunals through the House of Lords after prominent legal peers – including a former Court of Appeal judge – raised concerns about bias among the proposed 'independent adjudicators'.
Ahead of the Immigration and Asylum Bill being published today, the Home Office confirmed that the legislation will establish a new body called the Independent Immigration Appeals Authority (IIAA), staffed by members of the public trained to determine appeals involving human rights and foreign offenders.
The Home Office said progress had been to tackle the asylum backlog and judicial sitting days in the First-Tier Immigration and Asylum Chamber is being increased, ‘but the scale of the current caseload cannot be sustainably managed within the existing system’.
Details trailed to the media ahead of the bill's publication prompted an urgent question in the House of Lords from Lord Davies of Gower (Byron Davies).
Home Office minister Lord Hanson of Flint (David Hanson) told the chamber that the backlog currently stood at more than 151,767 cases, with the average time for appeals to clear taking 61 weeks. Hanson said the new appeals body would be able to determine appeals ‘in a way that provides justice to appellants with suitably qualified adjudicators independent of the executive’.
However, several members of the Lords raised concerns about bias.
Davies asked the minister what steps the government would take through the recruitment and vetting process ‘to ensure that adjudicators are genuinely independent and impartial, and to guard against the new authority becoming dominated by individuals who have publicly campaigned in favour to open borders or otherwise taken partisan positions on immigration policy’.
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Crossbench peer Baroness Deeth (Ruth Deech) called for immigration judges to declare financial interests and memberships in the same way parliamentarians are required to.
However, Labour's Baroness Chakrabarti (Shami Chakrabarti) pointed out that there were lawyers in the chamber ‘who have spoken on all kinds of immigration measures on different sides and nobody impugns their ability to continue to give legal advice or indeed sometimes to sit in judicial office’.
Chakrabarti, a former director of human rights group Liberty, wanted to know about the qualification requirements for the new professional adjudicators ‘because that is more important than whether they were once a member of Amnesty International - a good thing [to be] by the way’.
On the professional adjudicators being akin to magistrates, Conservative peer Lord Harper (Mark Harper) told the chambers that ‘the problem in this case is that people come to asylum decisions often with very clear views, either being against people claiming asylum or being very pro claiming asylum’. Harper questioned how the government would ‘guard against people not bringing those preconceived ideas if they’re members of the public to determining these important legal questions’.
Crossbencher Lord Pannick (David Pannick) pointed out that we already 'have a body of independent, impartial adjudicators who deal with immigration matters’. Pannick acknowledged that more adjudicators were needed to deal with the backlog and delay ‘but what I don’t understand is why, in principle, the government think the current arrangements or appointment of adjudicators are inadequate’.
Crossbencher Baroness Butler-Sloss (Elizabeth Butler-Sloss), a former Court of Appeal judge, asked whether the new adjudicators would have training on genuine cases of modern slavery and human trafficking.
The reforms will be set out in the Immigration and Asylum Bill, which will be published toda
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