The snap announcement of this election has meant that our work on the Victims and Prisoners Bill has now come to an end.
The ambition of the, now, Victims and Prisoners Act is to improve victims’ access to justice and support. We welcome the strengthening of victims’ rights through the enshrining of the victims code in law, but we continue to be disappointed in the exclusion of migrant women from the same level of protection.
As an organisation supporting migrant women and as the lead of the Step Up Migrant Coalition we had hoped this legislation would bring an end to a two tier criminal justice system based on immigration status alone. We have been calling for the separation of immigration enforcement and statutory support, such as the police, since 2017 because we want migrant victims to be able to access the criminal justice system on an equal footing with everyone else.
This legislation represents another law that has passed which excludes migrant victims from access to justice. At the final stages of the Bill, an amendment to introduce an information sharing firewall between statutory services and immigration control introduced in the House of Lords, fell at the last hurdle. This lack of protection will continue forcing migrant victims of crime to endure abuse and exploitation with no hope of holding perpetrators accountable.
As we look forward, we welcome the Committee that has been set up to look at this issue, as announced by the London Victims Commissioner. This is an issue that has been investigated by other commissions in the scrutiny of the Domestic Abuse Bill and the Victims and Prisoners Bill as well as by other investigative bodies such as the ones in the context of the first ever super complaint presented by Southall Black Sisters and Liberty. All of these bodies have been in agreement that a separation between policing and immigration control is necessary. We hope that this new Committee will take this issue seriously and act upon the recommendations that have already been published with the exigency that is required. We urge the committee to work with frontline organisations like LAWRS and the members of the Step Up Migrant Women Coalition on how to implement this very much needed separation between immigration enforcement and statutory services.
We are looking forward to engaging the Committee once a new Parliament is in place as well as with the new government to look for comprehensive solutions that can effectively meet the needs of migrant survivors, dismantle the barriers to access to justice they currently face and ensure that they are equally protected at the point they need it the most.