By John Ikani
Britain’s plan to send migrants to Rwanda is lawful, London’s High Court ruled on Monday, in a victory for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak who has made a high-stakes political promise to tackle the record number of migrants arriving in small boats.
A group of NGOs, asylum seekers and a civil service trade union had questioned the legality of the scheme, which would see asylum seekers – deemed to have entered the UK illegally as stowaways or in boats – sent to Rwanda to have their asylum claims processed. Applicants granted asylum would stay in Rwanda rather than returning to the UK.
“The court has concluded that it is lawful for the government to make arrangements for relocating asylum-seekers to Rwanda and for their asylum claims to be determined in Rwanda rather than in the United Kingdom,” said one of the judges, Clive Lewis.
The court also criticized Home Secretary Suella Braverman for failing to properly assess the circumstances surrounding individual people set to be moved under the scheme.
Braverman “must decide if there is anything about each person’s particular circumstances which means that his asylum claim should be determined in the United Kingdom or whether there are other reasons why he should not be relocated to Rwanda,” Lewis said in his ruling.
She “has not properly considered the circumstances of the eight individual claimants whose cases we have considered,” the judge continued. Those eight cases will be sent back to the Home Office for Braverman to reassess, he said.
More than 44,000 people have arrived in Britain across the Channel this year, and several have died in the attempt, including four last week when a boat capsized in freezing weather.
Britain has paid Rwanda 120 million pounds ($146 million) under the deal struck in April, but no one has yet been sent to the country. The UK was forced to cancel the first deportation flight at the last minute in June after the European Court of Human Rights ruled the plan carried “a real risk of irreversible harm.”
The British government is determined to press on with the policy, arguing that it will deter people-trafficking gangs who ferry migrants on hazardous journeys across the Channel’s busy shipping lanes.
Human rights groups say the government’s deal with Rwanda is illegal and unworkable, and that it is inhumane to send people thousands of miles to a country they don’t want to live in.
They also cite Rwanda’s poor human rights record, including allegations of torture and killings of government opponents.
The UK government has argued that while Rwanda was the site of a genocide that killed more than 800,000 people in 1994, the country has since built a reputation for stability and economic progress. Critics say that stability comes at the cost of political repression.
