The UK parliament voted to approve a controversial law that would allow the government to send asylum applicants to Rwanda to have their claims heard in the east African country, reported CNN on Tuesday.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s efforts had previously been stymied amid opposition in the Houses of Parliament and legal challenges in Britain, as legislators and campaigners attempted to block the legislation on human rights grounds.
Sunak stated sfter the bill’s passage, “We introduced the Rwanda Bill to deter vulnerable migrants from making perilous crossings and break the business model of the criminal gangs who exploit them. The passing of this legislation will allow us to do that and make it very clear that if you come here illegally, you will not be able to stay.”
However, campaigners and the UN opposed the bill’s approval. UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi stated that “protecting refugees requires all countries – not just those neighboring crisis zones – to uphold their obligations.”
The law “shifts responsibility for refugee protection, undermining international cooperation and setting a worrying global precedent,” Grandi added.
The effect of the law is that it will redirect people seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda for adjudication of their asylum applications.
Planes transporting passengers to that nation are not anticipated to depart before mid-July. If a person’s claim is granted, he or she will remain in Rwanda. If it is denied, the law states that Rwanda cannot transfer them anywhere other than the UK. However, it is unclear what would happen in that case.
Two years after the strategy was initially proposed, Sunak considers the UK’s lack of deportations to be a “serious failure,” the country having previously identified as a high priority the interception of small boats.
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill was introduced in Parliament along with the UK-Rwanda Asylum Partnership Treaty after the UK’s Supreme Court ruled last year that the proposed transfer of asylum-seekers to Rwanda would violate international and UK law, citing weaknesses in Rwanda’s system for determining individual asylum claims. However, the Bill and Treaty do not effectively address the Supreme Court’s recognized protection inadequacies.
In fact the law, as passed, prevents UK courts from fully scrutinizing removal judgments, leaving asylum-seekers with few options for appeal in the UK, even if they face serious threats.
Refoulement (or forced return) is the practice of forcefully returning asylum seekers or refugees back across the border, which becomes problematic when sending them to a location where they would face persecution or danger, because forceful return in such circumstances violates international human rights law.
The UK courts also determined that Rwanda’s asylum system, poor human rights record, and prior failure to comply with non-refoulement agreements made it impossible for the British government to be certain that asylum seekers’ applications would be handled safely and lawfully.
They further stated that as recently as 2021, the UK government had condemned Rwanda for “extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances, and torture.”
Now that the law has been enacted, the government may face legal challenges at the European Court of Human Rights, given that the UK is a signatory to the European Convention of Human Rights. Previously, the European Court of Justice prohibited transporting asylum applicants to Rwanda.
The bill’s passing is not necessarily a significant political victory for Sunak. Even if the policy were to prevent all of the small boat crossings that Sunak claims he wants to deter, it would have little impact on the UK’s net migration statistics.
According to the University of Oxford’s Migration Observatory, 45,744 migrants arrived on small boats in 2022. According to official estimates, net migration totaled more than 16 times that, with 745,000 people arriving that year.