Home secretary to claim almost 800 million people could claim the right to move to another country under the convention
Chris Philp, a Home Office minister, was the government’s voice on news programmes this morning and he explained why the government was calling for a review of the UN refugee convention. He told Times Radio:
It does need to be looked at on an international basis because we’ve seen people use asylum claims who are essentially economic migrants, and we’ve also seen people shopping around between different countries to choose where to claim asylum.
And that’s not how the UN refugee convention was originally designed, it’s not designed to allow people to circulate in Europe for a number of years before deciding where to claim asylum and making dangerous and illegal journeys doing so.
When I was immigration minister, I came across a number of cases when people had claimed to be gay, produced photographs of them and a sort of same-sex partner and it turned out on further investigation it was a sibling, it wasn’t a same-sex partner at all.
