The International Protection Act, recently signed into law by President Catherine Connolly, raises cause for alarm in several significant respects. It aims to restrict family reunification for those granted asylum, imposing a two-year waiting period and financial conditions which, in effect, monetise human rights.
International law recognises family reunification as a fundamental right under the 1951 Refugee Convention. Likewise, article eight of the European Convention on Human Rights mandates respect for family life thereby overriding states’ attempts to impede reunification. Why legislate in such a way that expensive and interminable battles with the courts will ensue? The UK tried this and look where it got them with the Rwanda nonsense.
The bar is set high to win an asylum case; and in many instances claimants have endured considerable trauma. To add to the mix, the damaging consequences of the loss of re-establishing family life inflicts a monumental blow upon several human beings.
Are Government Ministers ready to engage in such performative cruelty to make them look tough on immigration and thereby lend legitimacy to the hard-right playbook? Do they not recognise that a human right does not depend upon the size of a wallet?
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Property qualifications were once a condition of the right to vote; do we want to go back to such a way of thinking about basic rights and liberties? In the 1790s Thomas Russell and Henry Joy McCracken risked their lives for a constitutional patriotism that embraced the stranger and the union of religious creeds; why trade that for an ungenerous myopic nationalism that uncouthly bows the knee to mammon?
[ Thousands told to leave Ipas centres by July as ‘no longer entitled’ to live there ]
Article one of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Behind this morally charged language is the ‘never again’ response to the obscenities of the death camps.
The late German philosopher Jürgen Habermas made the point that the emphasis upon human dignity was not an empty placeholder, “but the moral source from which all basic rights derive their sustenance”. Convictions concerning human dignity are rooted in the belief in the absolute worth of human persons; and here Habermas acknowledges the debt to ideas from the Judaeo-Christian tradition.
In The Commonwealth of Oceana, published in 1656, James Harrington held that human beings had been invested by God with natures that fitted them for self-rule and made them citizens rather than subjects. He often called this capability “reason” or “virtue”, but his whole discussion is reliant upon the theological notion of people being made in the image of God.
In his Letter to the Ephesians, St Paul gave a ringing endorsement to the place of family life within divine providential care: “For this reason I bow before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and earth is named.”. Honouring family life is a matter of moral principle and compassion, as well as rights, and involves a relatively low proportion of refugees.
The new Act could scarcely be more badly timed given the fracturing of the western alliance over breaches of the United Nations Charter by the United States. European liberal democracies need to be seen standing four-square behind international law and not colluding with its piecemeal dismemberment. Where are the political antennae of the political class of this country if they are content to cut off the bough upon which they sit?
Bronwen Maddox, director of London’s international affairs think tank, Chatham House, has starkly warned: “The risk of staying silent and not standing up for the principles that have underpinned the liberal international order is that those principles do indeed become an article of history and not the foundation of the world we want to live in.”
Our national and European security can no longer rely upon Nato, but these depend on whatever is left of respect for international law and fledgling coalitions of the willing within Europe. Defending international order is integral to standing up to Russian leader Vladimir Putin on Ukraine and US president Donald Trump on Greenland (or wherever next). Ironically the International Protection Act does the precise opposite of what it says on the tin.
The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission rightly objected to the guillotining of the Act, which thereby excluded crucial amendments being tabled and debated. Notably, it does not allow for legal assistance from the outset.
There is no excuse for forcing legislation through without proper deliberation or providing the opportunity to address dysfunctional aspects of the existing asylum system.
This is a travesty of democratic process and a sure recipe for inadequate legislation that will prove contestable in the courts. Addressing the scandal of the inordinately long time taken to process asylum claims is long overdue, but this requires the hard yards of protracted debate and committee stage scrutiny that might have resulted in a less flawed and more considered final Act.
John Marsden is an Anglican theologian
