The British Conservative government finally obtained the adoption of its flagship immigration policy on Monday, devoting a Rwanda Expulsion Bill which human rights activists consider inhumane, immigration experts say it is impracticable and legal critics say that 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 their applications will be processed by authorities in the central African country. If they were subsequently granted refugee status, they would be resettled in Rwanda and not Britain.
From the moment the plan was first presented in 2022, under the leadership of Prime Minister Boris Johnson, experts said it would breach Britain’s human rights obligations by under national and international law.
Even after the adoption of the new bill, which was strong opposition in the House of Lords and indeed replacements Any attempt at deportation risks facing a series of new legal challenges, making it unlikely that large numbers of asylum seekers will ever be sent to Rwanda, according to a UK Supreme Court ruling.
However, the current Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, insisted On Monday, the government would operate several charter flights each month, starting from 10 to 12 weeks. “These flights will go, no matter what,” a fiery Mr Sunak said hours before the final vote. “It’s new,” he said of the policy. “It’s innovative, but it’s going to be a game changer.”
The plan’s tortuous journey to law passage is primarily a testament to the state of politics in post-Brexit Britain: a divided Conservative PartyDesperate to exploit anxiety over immigration to close the gap with the opposition Labor Party, clung to the policy for two years despite legal setbacks and deep doubts about its cost and viability .
While it is conceivable that the government could get some flights off the ground 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, would damage the reputation of the country as a country. a bulwark of international law 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 law and international law,” said Jill Rutter, a senior researcher at the United Kingdom in a Changing Europe, a research institute. . “With this policy, you are playing constitutional constraints bingo. »
Not only has this plan put Mr Sunak in conflict with civil servants, opposition politicians and international courtsthis led the government to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision – in doing so, critics say, effectively inventing its own facts.
The new legislation enshrines in law that Rwanda is “a safe country” for refugees, defying the court’s ruling, based on substantial evidence, That it’s not. The legislation instructs judges and immigration officials to “definitively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country” and gives the government the power to ignore future decisions by international courts. There is no provision 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 it was rocked by genocide during a civil war in 1994 and is now led by a leader increasingly authoritarian, Paul Kagame. Those who publicly challenge him risk arrest, torture or death.
“You can’t make a country safe just by saying it’s safe,” said David Anderson, a lawyer and member of the House of Lords who is not affiliated with any party and who opposed the law. “This is absolutely absurd.”
Given all these responsibilities, the surprise is that Mr Sunak has adopted this plan as a way of delivering on his promise to “stop the boats”. British newspapers reported that he had been skeptical of it when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer under Mr Johnson.
Political analysts said Mr Sunak’s decision reflected pressure from the right of his party, where support for sending refugees to Rwanda is strong. But he spent considerable political capital on the long campaign to pass the legislation and missed his self-imposed deadline of starting flights in the spring. The often bitter debate exposed divisions among conservative lawmakers, with moderates warning the bill went too far while hard-liners 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, went back and forth over the bill, as the Lords tried in vain 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 these amendments.
This allowed the Commons to pass the law, 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 still failed to ensure that refugees could not one day be returned to their home countries, where they could face violence or mistreatment.
That Mr. Johnson defended the plan was less surprising, given his bombastic, freewheeling style, which upended the cautious, evidence-based tradition of British policymaking. It is also a legacy of Brexit, which Mr Johnson campaigned for when he promised in 2016 to “take back control” of the country’s borders.
“Any time a little boat bounces and you can’t get rid of people, it symbolizes the fact that you haven’t really regained control,” said Ms. Rutter, who called the policy an “illegitimate child of Brexit.
Before Brexit, Britain cooperated with France to eliminate almost all flows of people crossing the Channel by boarding trucks illegally. But Mr Johnson’s relationship with French President Emmanuel Macron was frosty – and, after leaving the European Union, Britain had fewer levers to put pressure on 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 trying to push them back with giant wave machines.
The European Court of Human Rights could still decide to block deportation flights to Rwanda. And Labor has pledged to scrap the law if it comes to power. With the party well ahead in the polls, this policy could end up being remembered more as a political talking point than as a practical effort to curb perilous passages.
Even if Labor puts the project on hold, it could come back to haunt the party once in government, analysts say. Another law introduced last year bars those who arrived after March 2023 from seeking asylum, leaving them in limbo.
“Labor could find itself in a really tricky situation because 40,000 people are being put up in hotels at a huge cost to the taxpayer,” said Anand Menon, professor of European politics at King’s College London. “It’s not at all clear what we can do with it.”
The debate over Rwanda, he said, reflects a broader problem for Western countries when it comes to controlling migration. Other European governments are exploring the idea of processing asylum applications abroad, without going so far as to declare that people with refugee status should stay in those countries.
“There is a difficult debate to be had about whether the conventions signed in the aftermath of World War II are still 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 away. »
Yet even if Britain manages to send a few people to Rwanda, it seems unlikely that the policy will ever be considered a success.
“It has become so tainted now that most countries see it as a huge risk to their reputation,” Professor Menon said, pointing out that even Rwanda’s national airline would have refused a British invitation to operate the flights. “That’s not a good look.”
