Britain’s Conservative government finally won passage of its flagship immigration policy on Monday, enshrining a Rwanda deportation bill that human rights activists say is inhumane, immigration experts say unworkable and critics Legal experts say it has corroded the country’s reputation for the rule of law.
The legislation is designed to allow the government to place some asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda, where authorities in that Central African country would process their claims. If they were later granted refugee status, they would be resettled in Rwanda, not Britain.
From the moment 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 faced strong opposition in the House of Lords and effectively overturns a ruling by Britain’s Supreme Court, any attempted deportation will likely encounter a flood of new legal challenges, leading which makes it unlikely that large numbers of asylum seekers will ever be sent to Rwanda.
However, current Prime Minister Rishi Sunak insisted on Monday that the government would operate multiple charter flights each month, starting every 10 to 12 weeks. “These flights will disappear, no matter what,” said a feisty Sunak, hours before the final vote. “This is novel,” he said of the policy. “It’s innovative, but it will be a game-changer.”
The plan’s tortuous journey to becoming law speaks primarily to the state of politics in post-Brexit Britain: a divided Conservative Party, desperate to exploit anxiety over immigration to close a gap in the polls with the opposition Labor Party, is has stuck with the policy for two years despite legal setbacks and deep doubts about its cost and viability.
While it is conceivable that the government could take off some flights before the general election due in the autumn, it would only have done so at a cost of hundreds of millions of pounds and, critics say, a stain on the country’s reputation as a bastion of international laws and human rights.
“It pushes all the buttons: the limits of executive power, the role of the House of Lords, the courts, the conflict between domestic and international law,” said Jill Rutter, senior UK researcher at Changing Europe, a Investigation Institute. . “With this policy we are playing constitutional restrictions bingo.”
The plan not only put Sunak in conflict with civil servants, opposition politicians and international courts, but led the government to overturn the Supreme Court decision; In the process, according to critics, he effectively invented his own facts.
The new legislation establishes that Rwanda is “a safe country” for refugees, defying the court’s ruling, based on substantial evidence, that it is not. The legislation instructs judges and immigration officials to “conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country” and gives the government the power to ignore future international court rulings. There are no provisions to modify it if conditions in Rwanda change.
While the African nation has made political and social progress in recent decades, even sympathetic observers note that it was convulsed by genocide during a civil war in 1994 and is now governed by an increasingly authoritarian leader, Paul Kagame. Those who publicly challenge him risk being arrested, tortured or killed.
“You can’t make a country safe just by saying it’s safe,” said David Anderson, a lawyer and non-party member of the House of Lords who opposed the law. “That is absolutely absurd.”
Given all these responsibilities, the surprise is that Sunak embraced the plan as a means of delivering on his promise to “stop the boats”. British newspapers reported that he had been skeptical about it when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under the Johnson government.
Political analysts said Sunak’s decision reflected pressure from the right of his party, 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 a self-imposed deadline to begin flights in the spring. The often bitter debate exposed divisions among conservative lawmakers: Moderates warned the bill went too far, while hardliners complained it didn’t go far enough.
In the final act of this legislative drama, the House of Commons and its unelected counterpart, the House of Lords, kicked the legislation back and forth, as the Lords tried unsuccessfully to attach amendments to it, including one that would require an independent monitoring group. to verify that Rwanda was safe. On Monday, the Lords capitulated on the last of those amendments.
That paved the way for the Commons to pass the legislation, known as the Rwanda Security Bill. The government said it addressed the Supreme Court’s concerns through a treaty with the Rwandans last December. But critics said the British government had not yet ensured that refugees could not one day be returned to their home countries, where they could face potential violence or mistreatment.
That Johnson defended the plan was less surprising, given his bombastic, freewheeling style, which upended the cautious, evidence-based tradition of British policymaking. He was also a legacy of Brexit, which Johnson had campaigned for when he promised in 2016 to “take back control” of the country’s borders.
“Every time a little boat bounces around and you can’t get rid of people, it’s a symbol of the fact that you haven’t really regained control,” said Rutter, who called the policy the “illegitimate child of Brexit.”
Before Brexit, Britain cooperated with France to almost eliminate the flow of those crossing the English Channel as stowaways in trucks. But 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 vessels seemed almost comical, as when reports emerged that it was considering trying to repel them with giant wave machines.
The European Court of Human Rights could still take action to block deportation flights to Rwanda. And the Labor Party has promised to repeal the law if it comes to power. With the party far ahead in the polls, the policy may end up being remembered more as a political talking point than a practical effort to curb dangerous crossings.
Even if Labor suspends the plan, it could come back to haunt the party once it is in government, analysts said. Another law introduced last year prohibits those who arrived after March 2023 from seeking asylum, leaving them in limbo.
“The Labor Party could find itself in a really difficult situation because there are 40,000 people staying in hotels at tremendous cost to taxpayers,” said Anand Menon, a professor of European politics at King’s College London. “It’s not entirely clear what can be done with them.”
The debate over Rwanda, he said, reflects a broader problem for Western countries in controlling migration. Other European governments are examining the idea of processing asylum claims abroad, without going so far as to declare that those granted refugee status must remain in those nations.
“There is a difficult debate about whether the conventions signed after the Second World War remain fit for purpose,” Professor Menon said, referring to legal protections for refugees. “The problem is that Western countries want to present themselves as kind, generous and humanitarian… and keep people out.”
Still, even if Britain manages to send some people to Rwanda, it seems unlikely that the policy will ever be considered a success.
“This has become so tainted now that most countries see it as a huge reputational risk,” Professor Menon said, noting that even Rwanda’s flag carrier reportedly rejected a British invitation to operate the flights. “It doesn’t look good.”