The British government’s program for the transfer of asylum seekers to Rwanda lands in a difficult political fray and an even more complicated legislative process, after the Supreme Court’s no to its implementation. The new Home Secretary James Cleverly privately describes the plan that Prime Minister Rushi Sunak intends to insist on as “madness”. Or at least this is what Cleverly, who has just replaced hawkish representative Suella Braverman, who was fired for her criticism of the police for giving the go-ahead to last Saturday’s pro-Palestinian protest, is saying around, as she has denounced, publicly , the shadow Home Secretary, the Labor leader Yvette Cooper.
The topic is complex and the time to intervene is short, before next year’s elections in which, as in other countries, immigration will be one of the topics of debate and rhetoric.
Cleverly’s words are not political gossip, at the moment in which the government announced, as Prime Minister Rishi Sunak did yesterday, its intention to move forward with the controversial plan presented 18 months ago, bypassing the negative opinion of the Supreme Court , with an emergency law to recognize Rwanda as a safe country.
“We will take the extraordinary step of introducing an emergency law (i.e. with a faster parliamentary process, ed.). This will allow parliament to confirm that, with a new treaty, Rwanda is a safe country,” Sunak said in press conference yesterday. “I will ensure that flights can no longer be postponed with systematic appeals to our courts,” he added, also anticipating a new bilateral treaty with Rwanda which stipulates that anyone deported there cannot be sent back to their country of origin. .
The Prime Minister admitted that the deportations could be rejected by the Strasbourg human rights court. And he added that he will not allow “a foreign court to block the flights. If it chooses to intervene against the expressed wish of parliament, I am ready to do what is necessary to ensure that the flights depart.” This “necessary” will pass through a reform of relations with the European Court of Human Rights, he anticipated, without talking about London’s exit from the European Convention on Human Rights urged by the most right-wing exponents of the party after and the Court, which applies the Convention, last year blocked with its ruling a first flight ready to leave for Rwanda with asylum seekers on board.
“I don’t think anyone thinks that the fundamental objective of the European Convention on Human Rights is to prevent a sovereign parliament from bringing illegal migrants into a country deemed safe by parliamentary statute and international law,” he simply added. But things are not as simple as Sunak wanted to imply yesterday.
Politically because even if today Cleverly did not admit having used that expression, he actually confirmed that at least once he must have expressed himself decisively against the plan of the Prime Minister who chose him to coordinate his lame Rwanda plan. “I don’t recognize it as mine,” he said in an interview with Sky News. And to the BBC he stated that he did not remember having used that term, becoming defensive by speaking of a Labor trap.
The five judges of the Supreme Court first of all established in their ruling that the High Court, where the appeal against the project landed in first instance, did not evaluate, as it was required to do, the real risk that Rwanda migrants could have been sent back to the country of origin from which they had fled.
The Supreme Court also established that there are elements to believe that the government has solidly violated the principle of opposition to refoulement. Violating not only the ban on inhuman treatment, provided for by the European Convention on Human Rights, but also the protections enshrined in three different laws approved by Parliament in the last 30 years. Laws that would need to be amended, greatly complicating the work needed to get the project off the ground.
The judges then stressed that the government and the High Court should have considered more carefully the evidence of abuse gathered by the UN. If they had done so they would have concluded on their own, without having to consult the Supreme Court, that the risks were too high. This is despite the allocation, so far, of £140 million to send refugee standards experts to Rwanda in recent months, to help the African country manage cases and for staff training and other forms of support.
If Parliament also passes a law to ensure that Rwanda is a safe country, this act will have value in Great Britain but certainly not internationally. The deportation plan will continue to constitute a violation of the international commitments made by London. Namely the Refugee Convention and customary international law which London has respected. As well as the European Convention on Human Rights which was also largely written by British jurists.
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