Britain’s judiciary rarely openly criticises politicians, but this public statement had the support of dozens of top legal figures such as Lord Nicholas Phillips, former president of Britain’s Supreme Court, and Nicholas Bratza, ex-president of the European Court of Human Rights.
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Stephen Sedley, former Lord Justice of the Court of Appeal, said the government’s current offer to accept Syrian refugees was “wholly inadequate”.
“As a stable and prosperous country, we can do better than this”.
The letter recommends the Dublin agreement, which dictates asylum seekers must remain where they first arrive, has become dysfunctional.
Germany says it expects to take around 67,000 refugees a month, a total of 800,000 this year.
“The signatories of this letter include the most eminent and expert body of opinion concerning refugees in Britain”.
The Syrian refugees minister has refused to reveal how many people have arrived in Britain under the Government’s expanded resettlement scheme.
“This shoddy failure to disclose the number of refugees that have come to our country since the Prime Minister expanded the Vulnerable Persons Relocation Scheme is totally unacceptable”, she said in a statement.
“We are the sixth or seventh richest country in the world, it is not beyond our capabilities to make the necessary changes to receive our share”. “Global protection, it is a shared duty, a shared responsibility”.
“But that doesn’t mean we can’t use the people with the good intentions that they have”.
To achieve this we are now the second largest bilateral donor of aid to the Syrian conflict, including providing food, giving 1.6 million people access to clean water and providing education to a quarter of a million children.
“It’s vital money that is enabling these refugees to be able to stay in the neighbouring region where they immediately fled to and not embark on perilous journeys”.
Labour MP Yvette Cooper said: ” These senior judges and lawyers are right that the Government’s response is too low, too slow and too narrow. “If every city and county took ten families we could help 10,000 people this year”.
For Labour, shadow home secretary Andy Burnham said the lawyers’ statement was a “serious intervention” which ministers could not afford to ignore.
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The conservative government of the UK has announced that it will only take refugees from United Nations camps on the border with Syria, rather than taking part in a proposed EU-wide resettlement scheme for refugees who have already arrived in Europe.
