I said at the end of my last blog that, for all the punishment meted out to refugees, “there is no sign so far of punishment for criminal networks.” Yet Patel claims in her Policy Statement (see link below) that she is targeting the criminal networks in order to save refugee lives: “To stop the deaths”, she says, “we must break the business model of the people smugglers.” But how does she say we should do that? We must, she says, “better deter illegal migration and strengthen the protection of our borders” (p. 36). So the way to stop the smugglers is to target the migrants: they must be deterred from their illegal actions; our borders must be strengthened and protected against them. That, according to Patel, is the way to “break the business model of the people smugglers”. If the refugees can be deterred, the smugglers will have no customers and the way to deter them is to criminalise them, make them inadmissible, detain them, deport them, give them, if we have to, temporary protection at best, and then throw them out. Some of them may have to be prosecuted and get prison sentences. But that’s the way to do it.
So there will be (Policy Statement, pp. 36-37):
1. Tougher criminal offences (sentences?) for those attempting to enter the UK illegally, including raising the penalty for illegal entry.
2. Wider powers to tackle those facilitating illegal immigration, through acts like piloting small boats, including raising the maximum sentence for facilitation to life imprisonment.
3. Additional powers given to the Border Force Agency to (a) search containers “within the port or freight environment” if they believe people are trying to “conceal their entry into the UK”; (b) “seize and dispose of any vessels”; (c) stop and redirect vessels away from the UK.
We should pause at this point for, even here, there is little enough to justify the government’s claim that it is seriously targeting the “criminal networks behind people smuggling”, to quote the title of Policy Statement, chapter 7. The “tougher criminal [sentences]” in the first item of policy are unambiguously aimed at migrants and no one else. In the second item, life imprisonment for the pilots of small boats may seem to be targeted on the smugglers, but it isn’t. Patel knows full well that smugglers are unlikely to put themselves in danger in a rickety boat on the busiest stretch of water in the world. Instead, one of the migrants is chosen to be pilot and the boat is pushed out. The Guardian reported as much (see link below) in the case of Abdullah Kurdi, whose family was drowned in the Mediterranean, the body of his son Alan washed up on a Turkish beach. Abdullah, who steered the boat, was accused by some of being a smuggler:
The facts proved otherwise. Investigations into the smuggling operations in Turkey showed that refugees were often tasked with helping smugglers sign up passengers for smuggling trips. Their language skills and contacts inside refugee communities made them ideal as middlemen. It was also not uncommon for one of the passengers to be given the responsibility of driving the boat. No smuggler, with family in Turkey and a steady income from the lucrative smuggling trade, would want to end up illegally in Europe and risk not being able to return home …
Let alone be drowned. The third item of policy gives more power to Border Force staff. But smugglers are not targeted here either. Container owners and their drivers, and lorry drivers in general, are targeted because of the problems around securing their vehicles. We should note, however, that none of this is new. Lorries and containers have been targeted since at least 1999. Section 32 of the Immigration and Asylum Act of that year imposed a £2000 penalty on lorry drivers for every passenger without documents. This was done in line with the Schengen Convention; the Convention also imposed sanctions on airlines and shipping companies carrying asylum seekers without travel documents. These measures no doubt had some effect: they must, for example, have spurred haulage companies to ensure the security of their vehicles and discouraged drivers from accepting passengers. But it will also have encouraged smugglers to find new ways of getting their passengers across the Channel. Hence the rise of the small-boat industry in the ensuing years. Innovation and expansion, rather than deterrence, may also be the result of the current policy. The smugglers are not being directly targeted.
Border Force also gets the power to “seize and dispose of” vessels, but the smugglers and their access to supplies of boats seem little affected. In the original proposals, vessels were to be stopped in the Channel and “redirected” (physically “pushed back”) away from the UK, again with no real effect on the smugglers. However, this was seen by refugee agencies and others as extremely dangerous for migrants. Border Force staff also regarded this practice as dangerous both to migrants and to themselves and the plan was abandoned in face of threatened industrial action by their union. But in the case of “pushback”, too, Patel’s targets were the migrants not the smugglers.
The targeting of migrants is part of the criminalisation of refugees set out in Patel’s Policy Statement and made law in the Nationality and Borders Act 2022. Yet the UK has not only signed the Refugee Convention, which prohibits penalties being imposed on undocumented refugees taking “irregular” routes to safety, but also the UN Protocol Against People Smuggling, which it signed on 14 December 2000 and ratified on 9 February 2006. Article 5 of that Protocol is clear:
Migrants shall not become liable to criminal prosecution under this Protocol for the fact of having been the object of conduct set forth in article 6 of this Protocol.
That simply means that the smugglers are the criminals, not their desperate victims. It also means that Patel’s new law may be illegal in international law and somebody needs to test this in court. We might then be able to get rid of her spurious accusations of illegality and inadmissibility and stop her from sending innocent people to jail or deporting them to Rwanda.
That’s all for now.
Priti Patel’s Policy Statement:
The case of Abdullah Kurdi:
The Guardian, 22/12/2015: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/dec/22/abdullah-kurdi-father-boy-on-beach-alan-refugee-tragedy?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
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