Plans aimed at protecting Britain’s borders could put human rights at risk, former Prime Minister Theresa May has warned.
Theresa May, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom up until 2019, has told the BBC that plans to clamp down on illegal migrants claiming to be victims of modern-day slavery could end up endangering human rights in Britain.
It comes amid multiple claims that many boat migrants — especially those originating from Muslim-majority Albania — are lying about being victims of the crime in order to make it harder for British authorities to deport them.
As a result, the UK’s current Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has announced that she wants to clamp down on the practice to ensure that the UK is able to properly deport illegal migrants with no right to stay in the country.
However, during an interview with BBC Radio 4’s PM programme, May warned that any such attempts to clamp down on illegal boat migrants will put human rights in the country at risk.
According to the former Prime Minister, Britain’s current modern slavery legislation is “world-leading”, and any attempt to dilute it only risks making the problem worse.
“Critically, I want to see that we don’t reduce our world-leading protections for the victims of modern slavery, for those people who are so vulnerable,” May told the programme.
“It’s important not — inadvertently — to create another potential loophole,” she continued. “So, for example, there’s talk of requiring more evidence from individuals. If you’re somebody who’s been trafficked here as a sex slave, and you manage to find your way out of that and look to somebody for help, the chances are you probably haven’t got a piece of paper or a written statement from somebody to say ‘you’ve been in slavery’. The evidence comes gradually.”
“If you are somebody who has been brought by a criminal gang who are abusing the system, and they know there needs to be a piece of paper, they probably will provide a piece of paper,” she went on to say. “So it’s making sure that, in dealing with problems that are identified, we don’t create other problems.”
In some ways, May’s concerns regarding modern slavery in Britain appear to be well-founded, with the country seeing a record rise in the number of alleged victims of the practice in the second quarter of this year.
However, it is possible that some of this spike is down to the likes of Albanian nationals claiming to be victims of the crime in order to make it harder for them to deport, with even Albania’s ambassador to Britain admitting that his countrymen are using the loophole to prevent their removal.
While the former Prime Minister has claimed that she wants to see such abuses of the legislation clamped down upon, she has repeatedly opposed attempts to tackle illegal immigration in the past, ruthlessly attacking her own party’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda earlier this year.
Yet, during the BBC interview on Monday, May claimed that both she and current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak were of one mind on the topic of not reducing protections for victims of modern slavery, suggesting that the government might not really desire to get on top of the problem.
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