Britain’s Conservative government on Monday finally won approval for its flagship immigration policy, which includes a deportation law from Rwanda that human rights activists say is inhumane, immigration experts say unworkable and legal critics say will damage the country’s reputation for the rule of law has affected.
The legislation is intended to allow the government to put some asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda, where their claims would be processed by authorities in that Central African country. If they were subsequently granted refugee status, they would be resettled in Rwanda, not Britain.
From the time the plan was first introduced in 2022, under then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, experts said it would breach Britain’s human rights obligations under domestic and international law.
Even after the passage of the new bill, which has been heavily opposed in the House of Lords and effectively overrules a UK Supreme Court ruling, any deportation attempts are likely to be met with a barrage of further legal challenges, making it unlikely that large numbers refugee asylum seekers will one day be sent to Rwanda.
Yet the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, insisted on Monday that the government would operate several charter flights every month, starting in ten to twelve weeks. “These flights will continue, whatever happens,” a feisty Mr Sunak said hours before the final vote. “This is new,” he said of the policy. “It is innovative, but it will be a game changer.”
The plan’s arduous journey to law mainly concerns the state of politics in Britain post-Brexit: a divided Conservative Party, desperate to exploit fears about immigration to close the gap with the opposition Labor Party, has has clung to the policy for two years, despite legal setbacks and deep doubts about its costs and viability.
While it is conceivable that the government could get some flights off the ground before the general election expected in the autumn, it would only have done so at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds and, critics say, a stain on its reputation of the country as a country. a stronghold of international and human rights law.
“It pushes every button: the limits of executive power, the role of the House of Lords, the courts, the conflict between domestic and international law,” said Jill Rutter, a senior research fellow at UK in a Changing Europe, a research Institute. . “With this policy you are playing bingo because of constitutional restrictions.”
Not only did the plan bring Mr Sunak into conflict with civil servants, opposition politicians and international courts, it also led to the government overruling the Supreme Court – essentially, critics said, making up its own facts.
The new legislation stipulates in law that Rwanda is “a safe country” for refugees, defying the court’s finding, based on substantial evidence, that this is not the case. The legislation directs judges and immigration officials to “definitively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country” and gives the government the power to ignore future rulings by international courts. There are no provisions to change it if conditions in Rwanda change.
Although the African nation has made political and social progress in recent decades, even sympathetic observers point out that the country was ravaged by genocide during a civil war in 1994 and is now ruled by an increasingly authoritarian leader, Paul Kagame. Those who publicly challenge him risk arrest, torture or death.
“You can’t make a country safe just by saying it is safe,” said David Anderson, a lawyer and member of the House of Lords who is not affiliated with any party and who opposes the law. “That is absolutely absurd.”
Given all these commitments, the surprise is that Mr Sunak embraced the plan as a means of delivering on his promise to ‘stop the boats’. British newspapers reported that he was skeptical about it when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Mr Johnson.
Political analysts said Mr Sunak’s decision reflected pressure from his party’s right, where support for sending refugees to Rwanda is strong. But he spent significant political capital on the long campaign to pass the legislation and missed the self-imposed deadline to begin flights in the spring. The often acrimonious debate exposed divisions among Tory lawmakers, with moderates warning the bill went too far while hardliners complained it did not go far enough.
In the final act of this legislative drama, the House of Commons and its unelected counterpart, the House of Lords, passed the legislation back and forth, while the Lords tried in vain to add amendments, including one that would create an independent scrutiny group. require. to verify that Rwanda was safe. On Monday, the Lords capitulated to the last of those amendments.
That paved the way for the House of Commons to pass the legislation, known as the Safety of Rwanda Bill. The government said it addressed the Supreme Court’s concerns last December through a treaty with the Rwandans. But critics said the British government had still failed to guarantee that refugees could one day not be sent back to their countries of origin, where they could potentially suffer violence or abuse.
Mr Johnson’s defense of the plan was less surprising given his bombastic, outspoken style, which upended the cautious, evidence-based tradition of British policymaking. It was also a legacy of Brexit, which Mr Johnson had campaigned for when he pledged in 2016 to “take back control” of the country’s borders.
“Every time a small boat bounces around and you can’t get rid of people, it’s symbolic of the fact that you haven’t really taken back control yet,” said Ms Rutter, who branded the policy an “illegitimate child of Brexit .”
Before Brexit, Britain worked with France to nearly eliminate the flow of people crossing the English Channel by hiding in trucks. But Mr. Johnson’s relations with President Emmanuel Macron of France were frosty — and after leaving the European Union, Britain had fewer levers to pressure Paris.
At times the British government’s desperation to stem the flow of barely seaworthy ships seemed almost comical, as when reports emerged that it was considering fending them off with giant wave machines.
The European Court of Human Rights could still block the deportation flights to Rwanda. And the Labor Party has promised to scrap the law if it comes to power. With the party far ahead in the polls, the policy will ultimately be remembered more as a political talking point than as a practical attempt to curb the dangerous crossing.
Even if Labor mothballs the plan, it could come back to haunt the party once in government, analysts say. Another law introduced last year bans those who arrived after March 2023 from seeking asylum, leaving them in limbo.
“Labor could find itself in a very difficult situation because there are 40,000 people being housed in hotels at enormous cost to the taxpayer,” said Anand Menon, professor of European politics at King’s College London. “It’s not at all clear what you can do with it.”
The debate in Rwanda, he said, reflects a broader problem for Western countries in managing migration. Other European governments are exploring the idea of processing asylum claims offshore, but not going so far as to declare that those granted refugee status must remain in those countries.
“There is a difficult debate about whether the treaties signed in the aftermath of the Second World War are still fit for purpose,” Professor Menon said, referring to legal protections for refugees. “The problem is that Western countries want to portray themselves as kind, generous and humanitarian – and keep people out.”
But even if Britain manages to send some people to Rwanda, it seems unlikely the policy will ever be considered a success.
“This has become so tarnished now that most countries see this as a huge reputational risk,” Professor Menon said, noting that even Rwanda’s national carrier had reportedly turned down a British invitation to operate the flights. “It’s not a good look.”