What a stinking story of inhumanity. A country intent on sending asylum seekers to one whose residents have actually applied for asylum and sanctuary in other states. But the UK-Rwanda deal, having stalled and stuttered before various courts and found wanting for reasons of human rights, has become law with the passage of the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill.
The story of this deal has been a long one. On April 14, 2022, the government of Boris Johnson announced the Asylum Partnership Arrangement with Rwanda, which was intended “to contribute to the prevention and combating of illegally facilitated and unlawful cross border migration by establishing a bilateral asylum partnership.” Rwanda, for a princely sum, would receive those whose asylum claims would be otherwise processed in the UK through the “Rwanda domestic asylum system” and have the responsibility for settling and protecting applicants.
This cynical effort of deferring human rights obligations and not guarding asylum seekers and refugees from harm has been made all the more hideous by Kigali’s less than savoury reputation in the field. Refugees have been shot for protesting over reduced food rations (twelve from the Democratic Republic of Congo died in February 2018). Refugees have also been arrested for allegedly spreading misinformation about Rwanda’s less than spotless human rights record. And that’s just a smidgen of a significantly blotted copybook.
Notwithstanding this, UK home secretaries have gushed over Kigali’s seemingly falsified credentials. Suella Braverman, who formerly occupied the post, was jaw dropping in her claim that “Rwanda has a track record of successfully resettling and integrating people who are refugees or asylum seekers.” This is markedly ironic given that the Rwandan government has been accused of creating its own complement of refugees running into the tens of thousands.
The UK government has a patchy legal record in trying to defend the legitimacy of the exchange with Rwanda. The Court of Appeal in June 2023 reversed a lower court decision on the grounds that those asylum seekers sent to Rwanda faced real risks of mistreatment prohibited by Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. Rwanda, it was noted, 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.”
The government also failed to convince the UK Supreme Court, which similarly found in November 2023 that people removed to Rwanda faced a real risk of being returned to their countries of origin in violation of the principle of non-refoulement. That principle, by which persons are not to be sent to their countries of origin or third countries if they would be placed at risk of harm, is a cardinal rule in several instruments of international law and enshrined in British law.
In what can only be regarded as a legal absurdity, the Safety of Rwanda bill essentially directs the home secretary, immigration officials, courts and tribunals to deem Rwanda a safe country in accordance with UK law and UK obligations to protect asylum seekers. It also bars decision makers from considering the risk of refugees being sent by Rwanda to other countries and disallows UK courts from drawing upon interpretations of international law, including the European Convention of Human Rights. Effectively, a sizeable portion of the UK’s own Human Rights Act 1998 has been rendered inconsequential in these determinations.
A final, nasty feature of the legislation is the grant of power to a Minister of the Crown to decide whether to abide by interim measures made by the European Court of Human Rights regarding any removal to Rwanda. This is astonishing on several levels, not least because it repudiates the binding nature of such interim measures.
Michael O’Flaherty, the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, could barely believe the passage of such an obnoxious bit of legislation. Not only did it fly in the face of obligations to protect refugees, it constituted a direct interference in the judicial process. “The United Kingdom government should refrain from removing people under the Rwanda policy and reverse the Bill’s effective infringement of judicial independence.”
Shadowing these proceedings is an unmistakable, ghoulish legacy of Australian origin. The former Home Secretary Priti Patel openly acknowledged that elements of the “Australian model” of processing asylum claims in third countries were appealing and something to emulate. The particularly attractive element of the plan was the refusal by Canberra to ever permit those found to be refugees to ever settle on Australian soil. Other countries, including such European states as Denmark, have also chosen Rwanda as an appropriate destination for unwanted asylum seekers.
The entire affair is a stunning example of political entropy, a howl from an administration marching before the firing squad. With each failure, the Tories have tried to claw back respectability in the hope of appearing muscular in the face of irregular migration. They have accordingly cooked up a scheme that is not merely cruel, but one of staggering cost (each asylum seeker of the current cohort promises to cost the British taxpayer £1.8 million) and ineffectualness. Sunak, a laughably weak and unpopular prime minister, is, politically speaking, at death’s door. Despite getting the legislation through, legal struggles from potential deportees are bound to tear into the arrangements. What Britain’s judges do will prove a true test of character.
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Rwanda a safe place for refugees ??
In February 2018, twelve refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo were killed when Rwandan police fired live ammunition into a gathering protesting a cut in food rations.
Clearly Rwanda is being adopted as a harsh deterrent, what’s even more worrying is that the British government have been taking advice from Alexander Downer on border security.
The unwanted refugees are sent out of sight and out of mind.
Austraia serves as a great role model in dehumanising the stateless masses.
Sick.
Sadly, the malignant policies of the Australian COALition have been adopted by other Anglophone countries clinging on desperately to their 19th century self-image of importance while the reality is since Brexit it has been ”Fool Britannia” as the world by-passes the pomp & ceremony of previous centuries.
My God, I just cannot believe that ANY nation on this planet could be so heartless as to ship off desperate, vulnerable asylum seekers to a third-world hell in Rwanda, a country whose citizens eek out a very poor, subsistence living through farming on decreasing quantities of land. Poverty rates are extremely high and the history of extreme violence and political instability is of great concern and would indicate that Rwanda, a country that is brutally ruled by a fiercely authoritarian regime, ranks high on the list as one of the most unsuitable countries in which to literally “dump” unwanted asylum seekers! Not sure how much the malignant grubs in the Tories are paying corrupt Rwanda officials to assist them in forcing these poor refugees to become “out of sight, out of mind” but, no doubt, the Tories took their cue from the revolting example set by both governments in Australia when desperate asylum seekers were shipped off-shore to be tortured and abused in what can only be described as off-shore concentration camps!
This act shows a complete disregard for the plight of desperate asylum seekers! Everyone has the right to seek asylum and be free from persecution, regardless of how or in what country they arrive. It is not illegal to seek asylum. This fundamental right is protected in international law by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Refugee Convention. WHERE THE HELL IS THE UN WHILST ALL THIS IS GOING ON???
Mind you, this type of callous disregard for the basic rights of others is just what you would expect from the stone cold, callously inhumane, condescending elitists in the Tory regime! The despicable, totally heartless type of right-wing extremist regimes infesting so many western nations right now is a cause for REAL CONCERN for anyone who has one iota of compassion, foresight or empathy for ANYONE who is less fortunate and more vulnerable than ourselves. The current Crime Minister of Britain, Rishi Sunak, a British-born conservative of Indian parents, should know better but his rapid descent into the cruel, white supremacist inhumanity and self-serving depravity so typical of discredited right-wing regimes was “business as usual” by the heartless snobs in the Tory government who are still attempting to “recover” from the scandalous mismanagement of that bumbling fool, Boris Johnson!
Why? Why? Why do so many gormless Brits keep returning the bloodless Tories into power when they keep on and on exhibiting a level of callousness, arrogance and a born-to-rule disregard for anyone and everything with a pulse OTHER THAN themselves? Working- and middle-class people who continue to vote for the depraved self-serving miscreants, misogynistic predators and condescending sociopaths that take up every seat in extreme right-wing regimes are like turkeys voting for Christmas!
The Tories in the UK, the shrieking lunatics who support that megalomaniacal narcissist, Donald Trump, in the Republican movement are every bit as heinous and depraved as our own home-grown political psychopaths in the LNP! The fact that the Tories are SO gormless, SO unconscionable and so lacking in the most basic levels of awareness and good judgement that they actually take advice from that repugnant, affected, pretentious little cross-dresser, Alexander Downer, shows just how misguided and deluded they really are! Fortunately, the grotesque Abbott/Morrison regimes of the LNP were justifiably kicked to the kerb by a thoroughly disgusted and angered Australian public at the last federal election! Let’s hope that the people of the UK and America follow suit and have the compassion and good sense to stamp REJECT on the foreheads of every single member of the Tory and Republican regimes! SHAME ON YOU, RISHI SUNAK!
For the millions of words about asylum, refugee, migration and population issues and policies, the fulcrum or source of the disinfo is always ignored.
Deceased US white nationalist of fossil fuel ZPG fame John ‘passive eugenics’ Tanton, admired white Oz, visited and hosted by SPA.
‘Racist architect of the modern anti-immigration movement’ (masquerading as demographic &/or environmental science talking points) SPLC US.
In the US Tanton and Atlas – Koch Network shares wealthy donors, latter’s network inc. IPA and CIS locally, both Voice Referendum No campaign supporters; quelle surprise?
Another tit bit, Tanton was familiar with Quadrant’s now European correspondent who has a Fox board member, working as a ‘researcher’ reporting to him at a Central European think tank (Koch Heritage linked), Tony Abbott; despite Abbott’s supposed support for Ukraine it’s an anti-Ukraine and anti-EU ecosystem.
Here’s an old presentation of Tones’ https://danubeinstitute.hu/en/videos/2019-09-04-tony-abbott-immigration-what-europe-can-learn-from-australia
The idiocy of the Tories in the UK is almost beyond belief. They take ‘advice’ from people like ‘the idiot Abbott’ and ‘the errand boy Downer’ (Keatings name for him) and call it ‘The Australian Solution’. Rwanda became a member of the Commonwealth a number of years ago. Big deal.
I seem to recall some years ago as part of ‘The Pacific Solution’ Cambodia was accepted as a dumping ground for boat person refugees to Australia. The cost? Over $40 million paid to Cambodia. They accepted 4 refugees… Yes only 4…. I recall Prince Norodom Rinaradh (Sihanouks’ son, my spelling may be wrong) saying a decade or two ago. ‘Cambodia is a corrupt country’. ‘A very corrupt country’ (and laughing).
Bruce
It was worse : $55million for two asylum seekers to go to Cambodia.
According to the minister responsible that was a ‘good outcome’. The minister in question is seeking to lead this country as prime minister at the next election.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/mar/09/55m-cambodia-deal-that-resettled-two-refugees-a-good-outcome-says-dutton
What a mangy bunch of desperate arseholes. Now lying through their teeth and enacting reverse slavery at huge cost to ordinary taxpayers of many countries, and those enslaved.
May those arseholes be wiped out by climate change.
Clakka, climate change is not selective. If those arseholes go, so do we.
First they came for the polar regions, then they came for the East Siberian Arctic Shelf, and then they came for the interzonal regions between the Tropics of Cancer & Capricorn. Along the way they came for the deep water ocean currents, and then they came for us, we who thought we would be spared.
Hanrahan’s lament may have been local in its timing, and albeit a gestation of 100 years prior to its awakening, but make no mistake, we’ll all be ruined.
Nevermind,Rish! will be able to go back to counting his money,the little shit.And, as usual a Labour government will be left to wrangle with an almighty pile of ordure,whilst being pilloried by the garbage media.Is that mummified sack of shit dead yet?
Rooned,Canguro, Rooned.
I have relatives who live on the Kentish coast in England, not far from where some of these boats arrive.
They look on the Rwanda solution (the Australian solution !) as being purely a political ploy to get Rishi and the Conservatives back in at the next election. None of them think that the Rwanda solution will work but they are convinced it will cost an absolute packet.
Their problem, as they see it, is that the French are only half hearted in preventing the people smugglers, operating from French ports/beaches, from shipping these people off into hazardous waters to get them to England. Much as we were critical of the Indonesians for allowing the people smugglers to flourish but at least the Indonesians made the practice illegal and that, at least for the time being has stemmed the flow.
The UK asylum seekers are coming mainly from Africa and the Middle East, they transit through Europe and then use France as a jumping off point for England with the support of expensive passages arranged by people smugglers : the problem lies with the French who, when it comes to cooperating with the English are known to fart in their general direction.
Yeah Canguro, we’ll all be rooned.
But I’ve been readying for quite a number of years now. Three fifty metres AHD in a ditch in the motley shade communing and doing deals with the worms. Whilst I shed to them my leftovers, they will make sacrifices, provided, if I go first back to the humus, they’ll put me to good use.
Not a skerrick of supremacy to be found.