Without smugglers, how are people supposed to get to the UK to claim asylum? The law currently states that the offence of helping an asylum seeker consists in facilitating a person’s arrival ‘knowingly and for gain’. (The Danish fishermen also took a fee.) This week, Priti Patel introduced the Nationality and Borders Bill in the Commons. Among its proposals are to remove ‘for gain’ from the legislation and bump up the maximum sentence from 14 years to life. In other words, anyone who rescues a would-be asylum seeker from drowning and brings them to safety in the UK, even without any personal benefit (by some lights a clear case of acting morally), will have broken the law.
As ever, government policy dovetails with the tabloid press. Last week, the Daily Mail complained that ‘it is clear that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution – the registered charity so many of us help fund through donations, garden fetes and collection boxes – is regularly sending its vessels into French waters to bring in migrants.’ In response, the RNLI issued a patient statement reminding Britons that a lifeboat institution really does have to save people from drowning:
Our charity exists to save lives at sea. Our mission is to save every one. Our lifesavers are compelled to help those in need without judgment of how they came to be in the water. They have done so since the RNLI was founded in 1824 and this will always be our ethos.
The new bill appears not only to outlaw the current operations of the RNLI but to contravene international maritime law, which recognises a duty to attempt to rescue those in danger at sea. The government, in an ambiguously punctuated sentence, says its aim is to ‘deter illegal entry into the UK breaking the business model of criminal trafficking networks and saving lives’. That means asylum seekers must instead wait to be selected by resettlement schemes, which assist fewer than 1 per cent of those who eventually qualify for protection (and in any case have been paused for much of the pandemic). Or it means they should travel as the rest of us do – board a plane or a ferry, passport and visa in hand – and then apply for asylum on reaching British soil. But the UK government doesn’t grant visas to people if
the political, economic and security situation in the applicant’s country of residence, including whether it is politically unstable, a conflict zone or at risk of becoming one, leads to doubts about their intention to leave the UK at the end of their visit.
In other words, the vast majority of those who may need asylum cannot arrive by any ‘legal’ route precisely because they might apply for asylum. As so often, people are criminalised for being in need. And the government will do everything it can to avoid meeting that need. Hence the small boats and the need for rescue.
https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2021/july/the-other-shore
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