Rwanda Policy Declared Unlawful
This week three immigration stories caught my eye.
The first was the decision to restart the ‘deport now, appeal later’ policy despite a 2017 ruling from the Supreme Court that found it to be unlawful. I covered the detail in a newsletter post for subscribers.
The second was a defeat for the government in the House of Lords on the Illegal Migration Bill. The amendment will force the government to honour international treaties like the UN Refugee Convention.
Third, and finally, the government was today defeated in the Court of Appeal as judges found that a plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is unlawful.
By a majority, it was decided that the asylum system in Rwanda is deficient and could end up with asylum seekers being returned to their country of origin where they might face persecution and/or torture. This would be a breach of Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
Overall the judgment makes it pretty clear that the whole plan has not been fully thought through and goes beyond being merely experimental and could rightly be considered dangerous.
Underhill LJ says that officials “were too ready to accept assurances which were unparticularised or unevidenced or the details of which were unexplored”. In other words, the Home Office was willing to blindly accept assurances presented by representatives of Rwanda but ignored evidence like the fact that a similar policy instituted by Israel failed or that in 2018 12 Congolese refugees were shot and killed by Rwandan police.
Today’s decision is certainly an important win but it is far from the end of the road. The case will be appealed to the Supreme Court and (as I discussed yesterday) the make-up of the Supreme Court makes it a real possibility that the top court will side with the government.
The next few months will be interesting as we follow that case but the conclusion this week from the three stories I have highlighted above has to be that there is a fundamental flaw in the immigration policy of this country.
Suella Braverman can try to hide behind hard-line rhetoric but by this point it is clear that not only is much of her approach unlawful, its also just doesn’t work. At the same time it is costing the taxpayer more and more money as investment is dumped into bad ideas like a gambler who thinks this time they will get lucky.
Instead of doing something useful and building proper facilities to accommodate refugees, that same money has to be used to open up the doors of more hotels. If this degree of incompetence was visible in any other government department there would be outcry.
Normally a judgment like this or the defeats suffered by the government would be a wake-up call; a time to change tack. Instead Braverman has already blamed ‘phoney humanitarianism’ and she will likely follow this up by castigating lawyers who act on behalf of asylum seekers.
This is likely easier than admitting her own government’s policies are unlawful, totally impractical and completely lack any sense of morality.