Britain’s parliament has passed a law that will allow the government to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda while their applications are being processed. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak vowed to overcome further challenges and press ahead with deportation flights to Rwanda after securing passage of the landmark migration legislation.
The deportation proposal has been mired in controversy and legal battles since Boris Johnson unveiled it when he was prime minister in 2022. So far, no migrants have been sent to Rwanda. Last November, the UK Supreme Court declared the policy unlawful, but Sunak hopes the new legislation will override legal concerns and fulfill his pledge to stop people arriving across the Channel in small boats.
Rwanda, a tiny nation of 13 million people, claims to being one of the most stable countries in Africa. However, rights groups accuse veteran President Paul Kagame of ruling in a climate of fear, stifling dissent and free speech. Despite no deportations taking place, Britain has already paid Rwanda £240 million. While Britain hopes to send thousands of migrants, at the moment Rwanda only has the capacity to take a few hundred.
The Rwanda scheme, agreed in April 2022 by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, is designed to deter migrants from coming to Britain illegally and break the business model of people smugglers. Under the plan, anyone who arrived in Britain illegally after January 1, 2022, faced being sent to Rwanda. However, the first deportation flight in June 2022 was blocked by European judges. The UK Supreme Court then unanimously upheld a ruling that the scheme was unlawful because migrants were at risk of being sent back to their homelands or to other countries where they would be at risk of mistreatment.
To address the issues raised by the Supreme Court, Rishi Sunak agreed a new treaty with Rwanda that seeks to prevent anyone from being sent anywhere else other than back to Britain. The new bill compels judges to regard the east African nation as a safe third country and gives ministers the power to disregard sections of international and British human rights law. Some legal experts, however, say as the bill stands, Britain would still be bound by findings of the European Court of Human Rights which could again issue injunctions to block deportation flights.
After becoming prime minister in October last year, Sunak made “stop the boats” one of his top five priorities. At the start of the year Sunak said he had met a pledge to clear a so-called ‘legacy backlog’ of 92,000 asylum claims which were made before a June 2022 change in immigration law, although figures show about 100,000 applications still remain to be decided.
