The rights of asylum seekers “are more important” than those of Epping Forest District Council, according to the Labour Government’s Home Office lawyers, in a legal battle over the use of the Bell Hotel in Essex as migrant accommodation.
Lawyers representing Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, told the Court of Appeal that “the relevant public interests in play are not equal” and described the interests of the council and the Home Office as “fundamentally different in nature”.
The Home Office and the owners of the Bell Hotel are challenging a temporary injunction, granted last week to Epping Forest District Council, which ordered the closure of the hotel as a site for housing asylum seekers.
In legal submissions, Home Office lawyers acknowledged that Epping Forest District Council “represents the public interest that subsists in planning control in its local area”. Yet, they stressed that the Home Secretary “is taken for these purposes as representing the public interest of the entirety of the United Kingdom and discharging obligations conferred on her alone by Parliament”.
“Epping’s interest in enforcement of planning control is important and in the public interest,” the lawyers wrote. “However, the [Home Secretary’s] statutory duty is a manifestation of the United Kingdom’s obligations under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which establishes non-derogable fundamental human rights.”
During Thursday’s hearing, Edward Brown KC, for the Home Office, argued that recent arrests of asylum seekers were not sufficient grounds to shut down migrant hotels. He told the court that providing accommodation for asylum seekers was “in the national interest”.
The Bell Hotel has become a flashpoint for anti-immigration protests following the alleged sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl by an Ethiopian asylum seeker resident at the hotel. In court on Wednesday, it was alleged that Hadush Kebatu, 41, made inappropriate comments to the teenager, telling her she would be a “good wife” and inviting her to return to the hotel with him to “have babies then… go to Kenya”.
The alleged incident has fuelled both protests and counter-protests outside the Bell Hotel. Similar demonstrations have taken place at other hotels across the country where asylum seekers are being housed.
The legal proceedings continue as the government faces mounting scrutiny over its approach to asylum accommodation and the tensions it is generating at a local level.
