Criminalising Asylum Beyond Prosecution: Exclusionary Law and Policy in the UK

This paper explores the ‘criminalisation’ of asylum in recent UK law and policy, most notably the 2022 Nationality and Borders Act (NABA) and 2023 Illegal Migration Act (IMA), and the ways in which this framework has fed through into recent legislative and policy measures. Whilst the development and expansion of criminal offences relating to irregular entry and arrival may be considered the most overt form of ‘criminalising’ people on the move, in this paper it is argued that the criminalisation of asylum in the UK today should not only be understood through the prism of crimmigration measures which are expressly penal in nature, but also through an array of measures which, although framed as administrative and civil, are similarly punitive in character and serve the criminal punishment rationale of retribution and deterrence. The legislative framework of the NABA 2022 and IMA 2023 has paved the way for this progressive ‘criminalisation’ by sanctioning those arriving irregularly to the UK to claim asylum. This trend has been continued in recent law and policy, and progressively expanded in a manner that increasingly sanctions refugees for the very fact of having claimed asylum in the UK.