GBritain is granting asylum to more people than it has in twenty years. By the end of September last year there were more than 33,000 – in all of 2002 there were roughly the same number. Afghans, Eritreans, Libyans, Syrians and Yemenis no longer have to wait for a face-to-face interview with an official in their asylum procedures. For them it is usually enough to fill out a questionnaire. The British Home Office states that 95 percent of applicants from these countries are successful in their asylum application anyway.
However, bureaucratic largesse only affects those who have been waiting for a decision for a long time, and it has an expiration date. Originally it was only supposed to apply to “old cases” that had submitted their application before the end of June 2022. Then the deadline for receipt was extended to March last year. From July a new law came into force that turned the goodwill into its opposite. Under the Illegal Migration Act, no one will be granted asylum if they have not reached the British Isles by plane, train or ship with an entry visa, but have been illegally transported across the English Channel by smugglers in rubber dinghies and landed on the Kent coast.
Efforts to improve cooperation with Paris
As of the end of August 2023, the majority of the boat refugees also came from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Eritrea and Syria. They would have been entitled to protection under the old rules. But now they are legally denied any right to stay, and their number grows with every successful crossing – there are now probably 10,000. Since July last year, the Interior Ministry has had the right to intern any refugee who entered the country illegally until they leave the country and to deport them to their country of origin or another safe third country.
Great Britain can no longer deport the boat refugees back to France; there is no longer any legal basis for this since leaving the EU. In the past, the British could have tried, according to the rules of the Dublin Agreement, to transfer those who entered the country illegally to the EU state they first visited when fleeing. Not today. And even if they could: The regulation also works poorly within the EU.
Since Brexit, the British government has sought better cooperation with France to stop illegal crossings. Almost 500 million euros were spent, including on increased border patrols on the French coast. The number of boat refugees coming across the canal in 2023 will be a third lower than in 2022, when there were around 45,000.
In the future, the government wants to deport many of those who entered the country illegally to Rwanda, East Africa. They should submit their asylum application there. The Rwanda plan was announced in April 2022 by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but its implementation has so far failed due to objections from European and British courts. In June 2022, a first charter plane was supposed to bring some deportees to the Rwandan capital Kigali, but the flight was stopped in the last hours by an interim decision by the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
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