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A prominent human rights barrister has cast serious doubt on the effectiveness of the UK-France migration deal, warning that fundamental weaknesses could leave it powerless.Fadi Farhat told GB News: "It's certainly not the silver bullet promised by Keir Starmer, and the preamble to the agreement talks about how it's an achievement of diplomatic relations."FULL STORY HERE.
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0:00
This is a chocolate teapot of a deal
0:02
Well, it's certainly not the silver bullet promised by Keir Starmer, and the preamble to the agreement talks about how it's an achievement of diplomatic relations
0:12
The way it seems to work is that the UK must submit a request to France
0:18
within 14 days of a particular applicant's arrival in the UK. That's within 14 days of arrival
0:27
not within 14 days of when the particular applicant makes himself known to the UK authorities
0:32
So what you could have now is a scenario where actually an individual might want to run down the clock on arrival
0:37
Let's say one arrives and then you have a group that disperse and run down the 14-day clock
0:43
But let's say they don't do that and everyone makes themselves known to the UK asylum authorities immediately
0:49
You have 14 days to make the request to France, to submit the request
0:53
beyond that 14-day period, France will not consider it under this agreement. There's a lot of information to gather within that 14 days
1:00
There's a lot of assessment to do. So there's no way under current resources you're going to have the bandwidth
1:05
to deal with all requests within 14 days. But let's say one doesn't run down the clock
1:10
and let's say all requests or lots of requests are made within 14 days to the French authorities
1:15
France then has 14 days to assess those requests. It can extend it up to 28 days
1:23
and the treaty explicitly states that if France does not reply within 28 days then that to be treated as a negative request denied So in actual fact the French can just sit on it and they can effectively have a veto
1:37
to cherry pick and select what they want. And the agreement doesn't say anything about any penalties or consequences
1:43
should France not do anything or not even respond within 28 days
1:49
But let's say you don't run down the clock. Let's say you make the submissions request within 14 days
1:54
and let's say the French do get back, the agreement says that the end-to-end process should be three months
2:02
Beyond the three months, if it's not achieved within three months, it's silent on what happens or if France can just turn around
2:08
and not do anything. So, again, the end-to-end ambition is three months
2:13
In that three months, you can have several human rights claims and it does actually..
2:17
The agreement specifically caters for that. You can have claims in relation to age or age assessments
2:22
and there is no way... way... You can't even prove people's age. Well, there's no way under the current resources and
2:28
bandwidth that you're going to determine a human rights claim, as well as any appeal rights or any
2:32
judicial remedies you may have within a three-month period. In fact, if we did have that capability
2:37
most of the backlog and the problems we've had across the last decade wouldn't even exist
2:41
So, Mr Farher, in a word, is this deal utterly toothless? It would appear so, because the French
2:48
have all the sort of, they have their hands on all the buttons and they can decide to even ignore
2:55
requests and they have a veto effectively of if someone's a threat to national security
2:59
So in actual fact, it may not even be worth the paper it's written on
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