The U.K. government’s plan to send asylum seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda was found to be illegal by a British court on Thursday, dealing a setback to the Conservative administration’s campaign promise to dissuade migrants from perilous voyages across the English Channel.
David Cantor, a specialist in refugee law, said that the decision would “send a ripple effect more widely through this idea of sending asylum seekers to third countries.”
According to Cantor, director of the Refugee Law Initiative at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study, “Any country that might wish to enter into this kind of memorandum with the U.K. government, as Rwanda did, would equally be quite likely to be a government that had lax asylum procedures, (where) there were doubts about safety in the country.”
He said the U.K. “has had negotiations with many countries which do have robust court structures and asylum procedures, and there’s very little willingness there to contemplate these sorts of schemes.”
Three Court of Appeal judges ruled two to one that Rwanda could not be regarded as a “safe third country” to which migrants from any country might be deported.
However, the judges ruled that it was not illegal in and of itself to deport asylum seekers to another nation that was assessed to be safe. The government said that it will appeal the decision to the UK Supreme Court.
It can file an appeal up to July 6. Even if the plan is ultimately ruled legal, it’s unclear how many people could be sent to Rwanda.
It would be extraordinarily expensive, costing an estimated 169,000 pounds ($214,000) per person, according to the government’s own evaluation.
But it is pushing the notion even further by preparing laws that would prevent anyone who enters the UK in small boats or through other unauthorised means from requesting refuge.
The law would require the government to hold all such arrivals in detention before returning them to their home country or a safe third country if it were to pass.
The Home Secretary of the United Kingdom criticised a ruling by a high court judge declaring the government’s plans to transfer asylum seekers to Rwanda “illegal” on Thursday.
Speaking in London, Suella Braverman said she was “disappointed” with the Court of Appeal’s ruling and that she and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak did not agree with it.
The government agreed with Rwanda more than a year ago that some migrants who arrive in the U.K. as stowaways or on small boats would be sent there to file asylum claims; if those claims were granted, they would remain in Rwanda rather than returning to Britain.
The strategy is a key component of the government’s vow to “stop the boats”; it is intended to discourage people from trying to cross the channel, which will hopefully stop the criminal gangs from charging exorbitant rates to transport people across the water.
According to Braverman, the issue is “out of control,” and 45,000 people “arrived here illegally last year,” costing the British taxpayer “£6 million ($7.5 million) per day in hotel accommodations.”
“The system needs to be changed. Our laws need to be revised. That is how we will halt the boats, she explained.
Speaking in Selby, the leader of the opposition Labour party Keir Starmer said the government had “broken the system” and called the Rwanda scheme “a gimmick”.
“Only 1% of those arrived by small boats have had their claims processed and so the Government got no plan”, he said, adding that the scheme had “cost the taxpayer £140 million ($176 million) and nobody’s been removed”.
“Now we know from the court judgement this morning that the Government didn’t even do the basics to make sure that it was fit for purpose,” he added.
