... I'm not a lawyer, but ,,,
I also originally thought this was simple. However, I had done some quick reading on this earlier, and the reality is that ...
We may need an actual lawyer to settle this, but my understanding is ...
Sovereign nations <reassertion of same claim contradicting my own quick reading on this earlier, with no evidence linked> There is no obligation to ignore in the first place.
Are you a lawyer?
That is precisely why the situation is so intractable--and it was made significantly harder when the UK chose to exit the EU and lost access to shared European returns frameworks. It's the very same people, i.e. the pro-Brexit people, who are now blaming everyone else for a situation that they exacerbated.
That's an ad hominem argument.
That may all be unnecessary though. France is taking money from Britain to stop the boats. They're doing a half-assed job of it, and there have been widely publicized cases of French police standing by and watching boats being launched, and of the French navy escorting boats across to British waters, but they're allegedly getting better about it; and they'd probably get better faster if the UK government had the will to condition the payments on measured performance.
But ultimately, if in the end France proves completely obstinate, there's a fallback solution that doesn't rely on French cooperation: the UK can simply criminalize unauthorized entry and hold illegal aliens it catches in detention facilities until they say where they're from or it finds someone who agrees to take them. If migrants in France know that's what will happen to them if they cross the channel they'll stop coming. People respond to incentives -- that's the whole of economics.
You keep relying on the term "illegal aliens," but under the 1951 Refugee Convention (to which the UK is a foundational signatory), crossing a border without prior authorization to seek asylum is explicitly protected from criminal penalty.
And? Nobody said crossing is currently illegal. Which part of "can simply criminalize" didn't you understand? Obviously the approach I'm describing would require new legislation.
This isn't an oversight; it was forged out of the grim history of 20th-century Europe, WWII, and the Holocaust, where refugees fleeing authoritarian regimes rarely had the luxury of obtaining legal travel documents first. Mass, indefinite detention without trial violates domestic human rights law and international treaties the UK has agreed to abide by.
Looking for the facts about asylum? You can rely on the facts and figures in this article to give you the true picture about asylum.
www.refugeecouncil.org.uk
There is no such thing as an "illegal" or "bogus" person seeking asylum. Under international law, anyone has the right to apply for asylum in any country that has signed the 1951 Convention and to remain there until the authorities have assessed their claim.
It is recognised in the 1951 Convention that people fleeing persecution may have to use irregular means in order to escape and claim asylum in another country: there is no legal way to travel to the UK for the specific purpose of seeking asylum.
The 1951 Refugee Convention guarantees everybody the right to apply for asylum. It has saved millions of lives. No country has ever withdrawn from it.
And? You asked what the UK could do, so I told you.
More fundamentally, you and I are two laymen on a forum debating legal loopholes, while thousands of actual international lawyers, diplomats, and policy experts have spent years struggling to navigate these exact same constraints. The sheer friction of international law, national sovereignty, and human rights obligations explains why this issue is so notoriously difficult for any British government to solve, not merely the Labour government or some particular Muslim official.
You say all this as though a convention made up by bureaucrats 75 years ago to deal with 20th century problems is a law of nature that people who weren't born then have no standing to alter. Do you understand how the British Constitution works? Parliament is supreme. If it passes an Act of Parliament making unauthorized entry a crime then it becomes a crime. It's notoriously difficult because the current and previous governments lacked the will to do it. I get it -- it's a so-called "nuclear option", much like abolishing the filibuster would be here. There are weighty arguments against doing something so drastic, and no doubt it would be better if they can simply get the pay-France-to-stop-the-boats approach to work better than it has.
The UK does not have a border with any of the source countries the asylum seekers came from. Those people travelled through countries they aren't being persecuted in. They could have claimed asylum in France. Of course Britain is within its rights to demand the treaty be renegotiated to cope with the changed level of abuse, and to withdraw if other countries are intransigent.
Here is an AI-generated listing of refugees to the UK from Muslim-majority countries, such as Afghanistan, starting a few years before Brexit for a baseline, continuing up to today:
<snip>
Yes, yes, Brexit was a mistake. And? Is that a reason they should just accept permanent two-tier policing, free-rein crime, and loss of their civil liberties? Maybe if the government had offered its voters a suite of better options they would have picked one, instead of ignoring the people's grievances to the point where even a bad choice looked better to citizens at their wits' end than having no choice at all.
Given how genuinely complex these legal realities are, why jump to the absurd conclusion that the UK's policy struggle is evidence of a grand, intentional plot to engineer a demographic "Caliphate"? We don't need a vast state conspiracy when the messiness of international law already explains why there are no simple answers.
Why did you write that? Are you trying to persuade people who disagree with you, or are you just grandstanding to the self-congratulation-as-social-policy crowd? Yes, yes, everyone who is concerned about the consequences of the open-border policy is just a stupid conspiracy theorist so you're perfectly right to look down on them and dismiss them and pat yourselves on the back about what superior life forms people who think like you are.
If and when England becomes a caliphate as the entirely foreseeable consequence of current trends being allowed to continue unobstructed, the fact that none of the successive governments that each for short-sighted political reasons of their own chose not to obstruct those trends ever meant for that outcome to happen will no doubt be a great consolation to the dhimmis.
