Cruel Prerogatives: Braverman on Refugees at the AEI

Image from lbc.co.uk (Photos by Alamy)

Suella Braverman has made beastliness a trait in British politics. The UK Home Secretary, fed on the mush and mash of anti-refugee sentiment, has been frantically trying to find her spot in the darkness of inhumanity.

Audaciously, and with grinding ignorance, she persists in her rather grisly attempts to kill the central assumptions of international refugee protection, flawed as they might be, elevating the role of the sovereign state to that of tormenter and high judge. In doing so Braverman shows herself to believe in the ultimate prerogative of the state to be decisively cruel rather than consistently humane. The result is a tyrant’s feast, bound to make a good impression in every country keen to seal off their borders from those seeking sanctuary.

In her speech to the American Enterprise Institute, Braverman came up with a novel reading on how the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 has been applied of late. In her mind, there had been “an interpretive shift” towards generosity in awarding refugee status when, conspicuously, the opposite is true. She was particularly irked by those irritating judges who had endorsed “something more akin to a definition of ‘discrimination’.” All in all, “uncontrolled and illegal migration” posed “an existential challenge for the political and cultural institutions of the West.”

Lip service is paid to the rights of asylum seekers, though not much. She shows a keen fondness for the term “illegal migrants” such as those who made their way to the Italian island of Lampedusa, proceeding to sleep on the streets, pilfer food and clash with police. “Where individuals are being persecuted, it is right we offer sanctuary,” she conceded. “But we will not be able to sustain an asylum system if in effect, simply being gay, or a woman, or fearful of discrimination in your own country of origin, is sufficient to qualify for protection.”

Trust Braverman to turn universal human rights into a matter of gender or sexual politics. She further teases out the battle lines by attacking the “misguided dogma of multiculturalism” that “makes no demands of the incomer to integrate.” Such a failure had happened because “it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it.”

A quick read of the definition of “refugee” in the Convention stipulates a number of considerations: “a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particularly social group or political opinion”; that the person is outside their country of nationality and unwilling to “avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events, is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”

In 2022, a mere 1.5% of the 74,751 asylum claims lodged in the UK cited sexual orientation in their applications. The countries most prominently featured as points of origin for the applicants were Pakistan, Bangladesh and Nigeria. It remains unclear how many were accepted as a direct result of mentioning sexual orientation, but these numbers hardly constitute a radical shift.

The UNHCR was unimpressed by the Home Secretary’s AEI show, though hampered by the language of moderation. “The need is not for reform, or more restrictive interpretation, but for stronger and more consistent application of the convention and its underlying principle of responsibility-sharing.” The body suggested that expediting the backlog of asylum claims in the UK might be one way of approaching it, something Braverman has failed, rather spectacularly, to do.

The Refugee Convention has provided fine sport for abuse and blackening for over two decades, its critics always bleating about the fact that the circumstances of its remit had changed. A list of Australian Prime Ministers (John Howard, Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abott, just to name a few) would surely have to top the league, always taking issue with a document regarded as creaky and unfit to deal with the arrival of “unlawful non-citizens”. From the implementation of the Pacific Solution to the creation of such odious categories as Temporary Protection Visas, the protective principles of the Convention became effigies to a system that was being forcibly retired.

In Britain, New Labour’s Tony Blair, always emphasising the New over Labour, never tired of haranguing his party, and constituents, about the reforms he was making to a number of policy platforms, with processing refugees being foremost among them. During his election drive in 2001, Blair claimed that, “The UK is taking the lead in arguing for reform, not of the convention’s values, but of how it operates.” At the time, the chief executive of the Refugee Council, Nick Hardwick, gasped. “The Geneva Convention on Refugees has saved millions of lives worldwide.”

Blair’s Home Secretary, Jack Straw, had already set the mould for Braverman in his promise in 2000 to initiate a “complete revision” of the Refugee Convention, one that would see “a two-tier system to cut the flow of asylum seekers” coming into the UK.

At home, Braverman has made a royal mess of things. Keeping up with an obsession nurtured by the Johnson government, she has persisted in trying to outsource and defer the responsibility for processing asylum claims to third countries. The favourite choice remains distant Rwanda, a country unfathomably praised for its outstanding “modernising” credentials.

While the government scored a legal victory in the High Court in December 2022, which saw nothing questionable about undertakings made by Kigali in the Memorandum of Understanding and Notes Verbales (NV) about how asylum claims would be processed, the Court of Appeal thought otherwise. On June 29 this year, a majority of the Court decided to give Rwanda’s human rights record a stern, rough comb over, finding it wanting on the prohibition against torture outlined in Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Sir Geoffrey Vos, Master of the Rolls, felt that “there were substantial grounds for thinking that asylum seekers sent to Rwanda under the MEDP [Migration and Economic Development Partnership]” at the date the decisions were made by the secretary in July 2022 “faced real risks of article 3 [European Convention on Human Rights] mistreatment.” Such a conclusion was inevitable after consulting “the historical record described by the UNHCR, the significant concerns of the UNHCR itself, and the factual realities of the current asylum process itself.”

Lord Justice Underhill underlined the lower court’s own admission that the Rwandan government was “intolerant of dissent; that there are restrictions on the right of peaceful assembly, freedom of the press and freedom of speech; and that political opponents have been detained in unofficial detention centres and have been subjected to torture and Article 3 ill-treatment short of torture.”

As a result, Braverman finds herself at sea, struggling to find a port, or centre, to park her own, brittle dogmas. In July, she told the House of Commons that she disagreed “fundamentally” with the view of the court “that Rwanda is not a safe place for refugees.” She went on to say that her government took their “international obligations very seriously and we are satisfied that the provisions of the Illegal Migration Bill comply with the refugee convention. The fundamental principle remains, however, that those in need of protection should claim asylum at the earliest opportunity and in the first safe country they reach.”

And that, ultimately, is the rub: domestic politics vaulted by individual ambition. When considering the stuffing in such speeches, the international audience is less important than those listening at home. Braverman is likely to have her eyes on the prime ministerial prize, having failed to secure the Conservative leadership last summer. A troubled Tory MP, speaking to the BBC on condition of anonymity, had some advice for UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak: best get rid of the Home Secretary as soon as possible lest it “reflects poorly on him”. It’s a bit late for that.

 

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About Dr Binoy Kampmark 1443 Articles
Dr. Binoy Kampmark is a senior lecturer in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University. He was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, University of Cambridge. He is a contributing editor to CounterPunch and can be followed at @bkampmark.

14 Comments

  1. As this planet warms, and parts of it become hostile to human habitation, we are going to see far more movement of people.
    Wars are not the only motivator, whoever the sponsors are.
    Australia is a country with soil not seeded with land mines, or spent ordinance, and most parts enjoy a climate in the Goldilocks category
    Its tempting to a lot of folk who have very few options when it comes to survival.
    How we deal with this will be a sign of our maturity.

  2. Reading up on this, on related topcs, on U K Toryisms, on the shocking decline in qualities of U K government quite clearly since 2010 at least, on remains horrified at the drop. Britain now is lower by far than at any time in the last three or four centuries. Having defied the Spanish, the Dutch, the French, the Kaiser, Hitler, surviving poverty and Cold War times, suddenly, because of applied greed, ignorance, ill will, insolent misreading of anythng decent and correct, we have had a Tory run, with Brexit thrown in, to drag the old place down, We’ve seen (we oldies) the decline and disappearance of the old Empire, the maiming of the Commonwealth, the decline hopelessly of attitudes to royalty, nobiity, clergy, gentry, and now to humanity. Cameron the clueless clod, May the floptoed bad dancer, Johnson the ignorant funny toy rat, Truss the unTruss-worthy hopeless one, and Rishi the running ulcer of political affliction… Braverman lacks the essentials to form any decent attitude intellectually and relies on outbursts of pre-1945 assertion in bitter squirts, blaming all, sundry, others, everyone else for it ALL. Rule Britannia. Fool, drool, cruel, crash, bash, smash. Can anyone or anything stop the relentless drive there, to obscurity and infamy?

  3. Today I read the the remaining refugees on Manus Island are being turfed out of the Australian accommodation that they have been occupying whilst in a bureaucratic limbo. It seems that the Morrison government washed their hands of all responsibility for these asylum seekers that we had previously detained on Manus (until PNG courts determined that they could not be detained in PNG as it was unconstitutional and they had not committed any crime).

    So there they languish with their power and water cut off and their rent unpaid with the hope that they will just go away.

    What a mess, spud !

    https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/29/papua-new-guinea-refugees-evictions-unpaid-bills-rent

  4. Braverman ,the daughter of refugees,no small irony,is a real piece of shit.There’s an excellent article in the Guardian by John Crace, that paints a particularly dismal portrait of yet another woeful Tory.

  5. Given Murdoch, the brutal racist history of English aristocracy, the Crown and its absurd racist legal history and that of the rest of European colonial history and the Greeks and Romans of antiquity, the history of utter theft, bigotry and beguilement by the Xtian churches and the unremitting chaos of Uncle Sam, it is no surprise that the cringing RW nutters and their pettifoggers continue ever more desperately to brow-beat via BS.

    It’s alive and rampaging like packs of rabid dogs across the ‘western’ world, including Oz. They’re all coming out of the woodwork in our referendum process. And hyped across the world because of the insane manoeuvres of the revisionist, imperium-obsessed, unlearned Putin and his droogs.

    To me since the days of being spoon-fed at school the alloyed BS of Blainey’s history, I have been aware of the inevitability of increasing survival-based refugee migration as a result of the brutality and cruelty of the colonial project, and the rising despotism in other countries seeking to feed off it.

    And sure enough, it has happened, and is now accelerating because of the lack of care whilst exploiting and failure of the ‘west’ to give of its ‘civilisation’ back to those it stole from. And also because of desertification due to exploitation and now climate change and its rising anthropomorphic calamities.

    Everyone is feeling somewhat desperate, with the ‘west’ retreating to its sieges, psychological and physical, whilst the rest just try to escape. It has happened so many times before over hundreds of millennia.

    That we could take lessons from the last say 500 years. It’s not as if the blinkers have not been peeled off many eyes in modernity. We have the science and the tech, and the will of many. But given the cringing fear and greed, and the beguilements and obfuscations of the masters of vested interest in the olde worlde, designed infantilisation seems yet to frustrate maturity.

    One can hope it’s the last desperate gasp of the current circus of cringing masters and their feckless droogs, and that we don’t have to be dragged to obliteration like others so many times before. The good thing is there will be of nature, death, and hopefully a continuum of birth and thriving with diminishing corruption.

    Whilst primordial self and soul are countenanced, perhaps they’ll suffice as glue for blocks building on hope, and give rise to good measures. I remain encouraged to do what I can for the quest for survival and equity.

    Let ’em come.

  6. From the perspective of accuracy in terminology, I would argue that the pair of terms used to identify that troubled island off the north-west coast of Europe are up for revision, as Great Britain is no longer great, and the United Kingdom is anything but united. Geographically, the main island is a touch over 90% the size of the Australian state of Victoria, with a population of more than 67 million cf. Victoria’s ~6.8 million.

    Land ownership is concentrated in the hands of aristocrats and corporations; less than 1% of the population own 50% of the country, and essentially a quasi-feudal system continues to dominate the social and civil landscape, with class divisions clearly dividing that troubled isle into a nation of haves & have-nots and hierarchal distinctions still exerting influence over social and societal existence.

    From the perspective of ecological integrity, attention in recent years has focused on the woeful state of Britain’s rivers & streams, the great majority of which are massively polluted, on farms, as being a major source of this pollution in the sense of mismanaged waste from animals – pigs, cattle, poultry and so on, on the programs of privatisation under successive Tory governments that have seen public utilities such as water & waste management services sold to private enterprise and then fall into disrepair or fail to deliver acceptable services or pump raw sewage into streams and oceans; it is, to understate the extent of the decline in the integrity of management of that overcrowded and inequitable island, an utter debacle, compounded by years of mismanagement by the ongoing conga-line of presumptuously under-qualified gibbering loons, most of whom are from the sliver-thin upper echelons of British society, silver-spooners who’ve been through the sausage machine of the Oxbridge finishing schools for that privileged element and have adopted the consequential illusion that they are thus majorly qualified to manage the country and its modern challenges.

    We know their names, and they will live on in infamy long after they cease to have corporeal existence, but suffice it to say, as Phil Pryor has alluded, that the current bunch of pretenders are arguably close to being the worst of the worst in the latest round in the continuing decline of that former political and manufacturing powerhouse. As ye sew, so shall ye reap, I suppose.

  7. Good article and example of the wheels within wheels transnationally of socioeconomic and immigration interests of the right.

    AEI is in Koch or Atlas Network, like IPA and CIS locally; with Atlas having a strong presence at Tufton St. London, and globally.

    Further, in the US, Koch Network shares fossil fuel donors with network of deceased white nationalist John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton of ZPG Zero Population Growth fame, admired white Australia, visited and hosted by local ‘environmental’ NGO SPA; also two NGOs in the UK, where else, Tufton St. London sharing with Koch think tanks, all supported Brexit.

    It’s a very complex web to parse through, purposely, but US KPBS journalist (like others) Binkowski has researched Tanton’s mob, but also found by ‘following the money’ quelle surprise, sharing Koch Donors’ Network, see UniCorn Riot: ‘Eugenics, Border Wars & Population Control: The Tanton Network’ (By Brooke Binkowski, Contributor August 22, 2022).

    https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/eugenics-border-wars-population-control-the-tanton-network/

    From Braverman’s and the Tories’ (GOP & LNP too) utterances and behaviour, it’s clear these groups are not so much about ‘freedom’, liberal democracy and the ‘environment’, but corrupt nativist fossil fueled authoritarianism.

  8. Another great piece from Mr Kampmark.

    For some strange reason Braverman reminds me of the singularly vacuous Jacinta Napijinpa Price.

    What a tragic irony that these incompetent Tory women should ascend to such heights of dubious power. Nothing for feminism to boast about here as the world as we know it implodes in excruciating slow-mo…

  9. i will never understand how a child of immigrants can be so satanic when it comes to other immigrants or refugees. What is it? A wholesale buy in of bigotry to prove one’s bonafides? A wholesale decension into hell to prove how you fit in? Or is it some kind of Stockholme syndrome?
    Here in lays the ruin of the west as we know it, slowly slowly we destroy everything we stand for. And when you stand for nothing but your own voice , you get Trump ,Tony Abbott or Braverman.
    As frances said, what a tragic irony.

  10. The right wing side of politics must have an ongoing decades long breeding program to see who can come up with the most repugnant and cruel politicians who are hugely bigoted,anti-immigration, anti-refugee and just plain anti-others (except if you have untold millions in your bank account then they fall to the floor and spread their cheeks).

    We haven’t done too badly this century so far: The Mad Monk, Der Reichspud and The Brainless ex-fish and chip shop owner, just to name three.

  11. No matter what spin the Australian politicians put on it, it was not offshore detention that stemmed the flow of irregular arrivals from Indonesia. Rather it was action taken by Indonesian authorities to stamp out the people smuggling trade in coastal ports on Java and other Indonesian islands.

    Our own patrol boats and aerial surveillance helped but it was mainly the efforts of Indonesian authorities with Australian funding that, at least for the time being, stopped the people smuggling trade : agreed, there are still occasional boats from Sri Lanka as the repugnant Morrison helpfully pointed to on polling day in May 2022.

    The British, with consultants like Downer and Abbott, came up with Rwanda as a ‘dump and forget’ strategy for irregular arrivals but a drover’s dog could have told them that wasn’t going to work.

    What needs to happen is for the Brits to get rid of Braverman and the dodgy Australian consultants and start talking seriously with the French and other European transit countries : Brexit didn’t help !

  12. On a completely non-political note: If you get a chance watch a documentary called Squaring the Circle: The Story of Hipgnosis which is about the company that created some the most iconic and famous record covers (The Dark Side of the Moon to name one) of the ’70’s.

  13. Terence Mills, i refuse point blank to get into a “people smuggler” scare campaign. The issue was NOT people smugglers but our “us and them” base fires stoked by Tony Abbott and Pezzullo. The proverbial straw man. We had no problems with refugees before, ever. People smugglers my arse, boy does that make my blood boil. Shindler would have been shot dead under these fabricated pretences. But as i always say, when we have a substantial number of dumb arses in society, bastard politicians will survive.

  14. andy

    It’s established fact that people smuggling was a very lucrative, coordinated and cynical trade out of Java into Australian waters – around $6000 to $10,000 per head. What’s your point ?

    If the Nazis had sprung Oskar Schindler you are right, he would probably have been executed but that’s not the argument here. The people smugglers in Indonesia were not humanitarians.

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