From its website, you’d have no way of knowing that anything has changed at The Bell Hotel, nestled near Epping Forest on the northeastern flank of London – just a short stroll, we’re told, from the venerable 18th-century English mansion known as Copped Hall.
But the hotel’s current clientele is a far cry from the old mix of tourists and businessmen on away-days.
Instead, it has been accommodating 138 asylum-seekers from Africa and the Middle East – at the British government’s expense – while they wait for the laboriously slow legal process to determine whether they can stay.
Why We Wrote This
Growing public hostility toward asylum-seekers in a number of European countries is prompting governments to curb their generosity. Some are even considering abrogating international treaties that set out their duty of protection.
And it has now found itself at the eye of a political storm that could help shape how Britain and other European democracies deal with an asylum-policy crisis that is proving fertile ground for far-right political parties.
The immediate catalyst: One of the Bell’s residents, a man from Eritrea, has gone on trial for allegedly making sexual advances toward two local teenage girls.
There is a wider issue at stake. Governments in Britain and across Europe are under growing pressure to tighten their asylum rules, streamline the adjudication process, and speed the deportation of applicants who are rejected.
Yet there were signs this week that something more fundamental could be up for debate.
At stake is Britain’s decades-old obligation, under international law, for countries to offer asylum to anyone with a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion,” and not to send asylum-seekers back into danger.
So far, governments in Europe have held firm to their core commitments under two bedrock agreements: the U.N. Refugee Convention and European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Even many far-right politicians have appeared reluctant to advocate jettisoning them altogether.
But some governments, including Britain’s, have begun looking for ways to skirt, or perhaps amend, them in order to allow for tougher asylum policies.
Amid the public protests and fevered political debate provoked by the arrest at the Bell, even voices in Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party have argued that quick, visible action to bring down asylum numbers is essential to restore public trust.
One party veteran, former Home Secretary David Blunkett, suggested last week that Mr. Starmer should consider “suspending particular elements” of the European and U.N. rights conventions for up to six months to “get a grip” on the situation.
And this week, Nigel Farage, leader of the right-wing Reform UK party, weighed in. Reform has leapfrogged both Labour and the struggling Conservative Party to lead recent opinion polls.
On Tuesday, at a news conference, Mr. Farage unveiled his asylum policy, “Operation Restoring Justice.”
Its central plank was a commitment to “detain and deport” all of the tens of thousands of “small boat” arrivals – refugees from as far away as Ethiopia and Afghanistan making the perilous crossing from France in hopes of reaching England.
Pointing at a mock airline departures board, Mr. Farage pledged as many as five deportation flights a day to send back some 600,000 refugees. To achieve that, he said, he would pull Britain out of the Convention on Human Rights, and “disapply” the U.N. Refugee Convention.
The prime minister’s office was quick to reject the idea. Additionally, Mr. Farage’s plans will have no immediate practical effect: Labour retains a majority in the House of Commons, where Reform holds only four seats, and Mr. Starmer is under no obligation to call an election until 2029.
Still, the political impact will be less easy to dismiss, at a time when Reform increasingly appears to be making the weather, and Mr. Starmer is anxious to convince voters that he is taking a tougher line.
Amid the controversy surrounding the Bell, the government pledged to speed up the closure of all such “asylum hotels” – totaling more than 200 countrywide.
There are also signs that, even though Mr. Starmer is himself a former human rights lawyer, the search is on for legal workarounds to allow early, visible progress on managing asylum.
The government has announced plans for an independent panel, rather than judges, to hear asylum appeals, in a bid to clear a backlog of some 50,000 cases that have been on the books for more than six months.
Justice Minister Shabana Mahmood recently told a European audience that it was time to apply “common sense” to aspects of the ECHR, by which she meant narrowing the grounds on which an asylum-seeker can lodge a legal appeal against deportation.
Germany recently sent back refugees to Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, and has joined several other European Union countries in advocating an EU policy change to facilitate such repatriation flights.
Mr. Farage pledged to send refugees back not only to Afghanistan, but also to Iran and Yemen.
So far, Britain has steered clear of deporting asylum-seekers to any of those countries.
But might that change? The bar is high.
The ECHR sets an unequivocal human rights standard that any such deportations would have to meet: that no individual should risk being “subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading punishment.”
And almost as though anticipating future “common sense” political challenges, its definition of that guarantee is explicit:
A common obligation. Protecting all individuals, applying to all states.
