The Scottish Refugee Council is one of the main refugee rights charities in Scotland. We deliver services to people on the spectrum of international protection: people who are trying to access the asylum procedure, people in the asylum procedure and people who have been recognised by the UK state as refugees, as well as people who have been refused recognition and therefore are not protected by the UK state as refugees. We also work with Syrian families who have come through the UK state’s humanitarian protection programme and the resettlement programme. We deliver services and community engagement work with all of those communities.
We also do a substantial amount of policy advocacy work. We work at different levels of governance: the European level, the UK level, which is difficult and challenging for us—I will get to that in a second—and the Scottish level, as well as locally, where things are a bit more productive and it is easier for us to bring about change and get others to listen to our priorities and those of the people with whom we work.
I will step back a bit from that. We welcome the committee’s work. It carried out a well-regarded and impactful inquiry into destitution as it affects asylum seekers as well as people with insecure forms of immigration status. That is an example of the Scottish Parliament not being bound rigidly by devolved competence and recognising, as it did with trafficking, that issues that are asserted to be reserved are not reserved in practice or reserved in the daily lives of people in Scotland. Social security is another example of that.
To me and many other people—I agreed with what Helen Martin and Gordon MacRae said on this—asking what we can do about human rights inherently includes the need for an analysis of power relationships. That is inherent in human rights because, if rights are not practically accessible to people, they are not rights at all. That, rather than some theoretical exercise, needs to be the test from which we work. The emphasis on prevention and, as Gordon MacRae said, not putting the onus on individuals follows from that. One can make no more conservative intervention than putting the onus on the individual. If one looks at the history of any discrimination legislation, one sees that one of the key asks and pushes from all campaigners, whether for the legislation on race relations, equal pay, sex discrimination or disability discrimination, relates to that, so why would it be any different now?
That is very topical in relation to how the Windrush generation has been treated by the UK state through its Home Office function. That is little short of disgraceful, but we need to be clear that it is a logical symptom and logical product of the UK Government’s hostile environment policy. I say that because, as Mary Fee’s question indicates, the committee has a real responsibility to adopt a relentlessly critical perspective, immediately get to the power imbalances within society and prioritise the widest range of voices that it can, particularly those of people who have lived experience of issues. As Helen Martin mentioned, the committee has a comparatively good track record on that but, of course, one of the worst things that one can do from a human rights perspective is to be complacent, so the committee needs to ensure that it does not do that.
I will focus on the asylum system as an illustration of some of the challenges with which we are working. At the Scottish Refugee Council we are clear, and I think that we speak for the wider refugee and migrant sector in this, that there has been a real contortion of the universal human right to seek sanctuary and safety—asylum—in another country. As Bill Scott correctly articulated, that legal right was born from the international community’s revulsion at the horrors of the Holocaust. However, we are clear that successive UK state Governments, as the state party to the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, have contorted that right to asylum and made it into something that it is not. They have made it into something that has great negativity around it, when we and the people who make decisions on asylum cases, among other things, should genuinely be proud of it.
If you look at the UK asylum system since 2000, you see that it has been the hostile environment policy in practice. Now it has been given that name, and the policy has been applied to a much wider group of individuals with other forms of immigration status query. To respond to Gail Ross’s earlier question, one can make a practical difference to that through the relentlessly critical perspective, through the emphasis on prevention and through not putting a perverse onus on the individuals. However, it is also about recognising that practical measures need to be taken.
Things such as advocacy services are essential. If we did not have advocacy services for people across the protection spectrum, we would not be able to ensure that people could access their rights. Without them, a decision can be made—which will not be articulated as such—that it does not matter whether people can access those services. Advocacy services are a bridge for people to access rights, so it is important that we are clear that they are not an add-on. They are an essential part of a human rights-based approach in any community where there are—as there always are—significant power imbalances that affect certain groups and communities. Bill Scott alluded to that. We need to work from that basis. In that regard, we welcome the inquiry by the committee, which has a proven track record in taking this work forward.
We are now in a Brexit environment, and the Scottish Refugee Council is very concerned about that, because it removes the European Union directive sources of protection for people on the international protection spectrum. Frankly, we do not trust the UK Government, given the ways in which successive Governments have treated the rights of people in the asylum process. For example, aside from the denial of the right to work, the asylum support system says that it is okay for people to live on financial support that is between 40 and 50 per cent of the minimum social security level for everybody else. What is that if it is not state discrimination? People do not need to agree with that, but we are clear about it, and we see the lived experience of children and mums who have to go without and do not get the food and the nutrition that they need.
Bill Scott talked about what has happened with austerity. We have experienced that in the asylum support system for more than 20 years now, and it is something that we need to name as a discriminatory system. Some would say that it is a racially discriminatory system, and we would not disagree with that. Let us break the institutionalised thinking that exists around so many of our human rights, which Helen Martin alluded to earlier. We believe that the asylum support system is a clear example of that. Why is it okay that a child who has come from Syria, Eritrea or Afghanistan has to go without when a child with whom they are friends at school does not? Of course that is a disgrace, and it should not be the case. To give the Scottish Government its due, I note that it recognises that and has tried to maximise measures to try to deal with it. The Child Poverty (Scotland) Act 2017, and the national delivery plan that has come from it, is the latest example of that.
The Scottish Parliament’s committee structure is a really positive—and, I think, essential—intervention to make sure that human rights are taken forward and are realisable for the people who are resident and are citizens within the country.