The Government maintains a policy that wants to ruin the traffickers of the English Channel and receives multiple moral condemnations
The European Court of Human Rights blocked the takeoff of the first migrant flight to Rwanda on Tuesday night, frustrating the British government’s efforts to initiate a policy of deportation to the African country of people who arrive on British shores in boats operated from France by drug gangs.
A debate over the morality and legality of the deportation of immigrants to Rwanda shook British society throughout Tuesday, while a Boeing plane from the Spanish company Privilege Style waited on the tarmac of a military airfield in south-west England. Seven passengers would go on the initial flight. But in the evening the Strasbourg court halted the deportation of one of the passengers, the Iraqi known as KN.
The European court did not believe there was an effective legal mechanism for him to return to the UK if his appeal in the English courts against deportation to Rwanda was successful. Lawyers for the other six passengers filed new appeals in London, which were accepted. Judges in Strasbourg are asking that the flights be postponed until British courts complete a review of the legality of the government’s policy.
The objective of the Executive is to ruin the business of traffickers who facilitate the embarkation on the French coast of men, women and children, in particular from Middle Eastern countries (Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan), bound for the beaches of the coast of the south east england. About a hundred were rescued on Tuesday morning and landed by British patrols at Dover.
From January to March of this year, 141 full boats reached the English coast. In 2021, a total of 1,034 arrived. Last week, 5 boats with 150 migrants. The previous one, 20 and 658. The figures from the Ministry of Defense, which has been in charge of intercepting them on the English coast since April, does not offer a regular pattern, but it does indicate that traffickers have increased the number of passengers.
The British blame the British and French governments, the lack of control of the borders of the European Union or the disorder of the world for the continuity of the saga that in the past decade produced the fields created around Calais. Security was tightened and higher and stronger fences were erected to prevent migrants from sneaking into trains or trucks through the English Channel Tunnel.
The former Prime Minister, Theresa May, fostered a “hostile environment” towards immigration, which the ‘Brexit’ sealed. Johnson entrusted the Interior Ministry to Priti Patel, who has had tense and unsuccessful negotiations with her French colleagues to neutralize drug gangs. And he has not persuaded refugees to seek asylum in the UK from the European countries they arrive in.
In April he went a step further. It signed an Association for Immigration and Economic Development with the Government of Kigali, for which London offers the expenses of reception, food, assistance, and five years of training for the integration in the African country of those deported from the United Kingdom. The initial investment is around 140 million euros.
Temporary
The plan is to send those who did not apply for asylum in European countries, before embarking on the boats, and to analyze their possible reception as refugees in Rwanda. They may be deported to their country of origin, or to another host country, if they do not meet local requirements. Israel already practiced a similar policy with Rwanda. Australia with the island of Nauru. Both were abandoned.
The initial plan was to transport 130 people, but complaints in the British courts, invoking breaches of the European Convention on Human Rights, reduced the list to seven. The three instances that have seen the request that the Government’s policy be considered illegal gave as valid the Government’s argument about the “public interest” of its plan. Full judicial review of the policy has been deferred to July.
Prince Charles, who will be in Kigali next week chairing a Commonwealth meeting on behalf of Queen Elizabeth II, would have described the government’s policy as “appalling” in a private conversation. The 26 bishops of the Church of England who sit in the House of Lords wrote a letter in ‘The Times’ in which they say that the government’s plan “embarrasses the nation”.
The United Nations Refugee Agency condemns the London policy as “incompatible in letter and spirit with the 1951 Refugee Convention.” He does not believe that the agreement with Rwanda is “an appropriate transfer system.” It considers it unacceptable that “an attempt is made to displace the responsibility of identifying and fulfilling the need for international protection” of refugees.
Charitable associations have taken their complaint to court, but the three instances that have heard the case consider the Government’s argument about the “public interest” of its plan to be valid. There will be a fuller judicial review in July. Specialist lawyers have removed their clients from the initial list of 130 passengers, appealing to the protection of family life in the European Convention on Human Rights.
Johnson, according to ‘The Times’, is considering the possibility of leaving the Convention. The immigrants’ lawyers would be “accomplices” of the smuggling gangs, according to the prime minister. His battles with the EU and illegal immigration perhaps reinforce cohesion with a substantial section of his electorate. Minister Patel said last night that she was immediately beginning preparations for the next flight.
The annual cost of asylum policy is more than 1,740 million euros per year. The cost per person for the processing of the asylum application is about 14,000 euros. More or less what he is going to pay Rwanda for each deportee. The plan has an initial term of five years. One measure of its results would be its impact on migrant smuggling in the canal.
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