Braverman’s claim over lowering of threshold for asylum seekers debunked by lawyers

Immigration experts say home secretary’s speech criticising global treaties related to refugees against guidance from her own department

Suella Braverman’s claim that increasing numbers of asylum seekers find refuge in the west because the threshold to qualify for asylum has been lowered does not apply in the UK under guidance in her own department, lawyers have said.

In a controversial speech on Tuesday, the home secretary said that as case law has developed since the Refugee Convention 1951, “what we have seen in practice, is an interpretive shift away from ‘persecution’, in favour of something more akin to a definition of ‘discrimination’.”