Bill 'could protect regimes of terror'

Inside Parliament; Opposition raises fears over asylum legislation t Blair calls for election after defection

Michael Howard's white list of countries whose citizens he believes at no serious risk of persecution could be used as a "mask of respectability" behind which human rights abuses continued unchecked, a Commons committee was told yesterday.

Opposition MPs on the committee at present dissecting the Asylum and Immigration Bill are pressing for safeguards to the summary treatment proposed for would-be refugees from countries on the list.

"In their absence, we are putting at risk the lives and the bodies as well as the liberties of applicants for whom we get it wrong," Keith Hill, Labour MP for Streatham, said. "The effect of what is proposed [by the Government] is to override individual rights in favour of collective convenience."

Doug Henderson, a Labour home affairs spokesman, and David Alton, the sole Liberal Democrat on the committee, pointed to the persecution of the Christian minority in Pakistan including the killing of a man for allegedly writing blasphemous remarks on the wall of a mosque. Pakistan is one of seven countries on the list of designated countries whose citizens will be dealt with on a fast-track system with only rudimentary appeal rights if they try to settle in Britain.

Mr Henderson said it was "bizarre" that Pakistan had been included on the list. He proposed amendments intended to ensure immigration officials did not take a "blanket" approach to all applicants from "white list" countries but looked at cases on merit. Romania and Bulgaria are also on the list, despite document evidence of ill-treatment of gypsy minorities.

Tory MPs, who tend to say little on committees and concentrate on their mail, reacted angrily when Diane Abbott, Labour MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington, said that while the expertise on minorities at risk was "limitless" at mandarin level, the clerical and executive grade staff who took decisions at the airports did not have that expertise. Cases were just "shovelled through", she said.

Challenged by Timothy Kirkhope, a junior Home Office minister, to disassociate himself from Ms Abbott's remarks, Mr Henderson suggested she meant officials were hard-pressed.

An immigration official had told him that even before the list was leaked in the autumn, the merits of individual applications from countries on it frequently were not taken into account, Mr Henderson said. "The Government are trying to legitimise a practice which has already been taking place."

Mr Alton dwelt on the danger of the white list being seen as a "blessing" from the British parliament that a country had a clean human rights record.

Countries could use inclusion just as China used British support for its population control programme as evidence of a "clean bill of health" despite the latest "horrendous" evidence of children being starved to death in its orphanages, Mr Alton said. So far China is not on the Home Secretary's list.

The first Prime Minister's Question Time of the new term brought calls, led by Tony Blair, for an election and sniping at the defector, Emma Nicholson, who took her seat on the Liberal Democrat benches.

Paul Flynn, Labour MP for Newport West questioned the democratic legitimacy of a prime minister who had "lost the last vote in this House [on fishing policy], who has lost every by-election in the country by a mile and is now being abandoned by some of his most honourable members."

But Mr Major had an obvious answer. To Tory cheers, he replied: "I think the legitimacy might have something to do with the largest popular vote ever recorded at the last election - and a majority in this House."