The innocuously named Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024 is now an act of Parliament in the United Kingdom (UK). Orwellian in content, the Act seeks to ostensibly deter unlawful migration, particularly by unsafe and illegal routes, by allowing some migrants to be sent to the Republic of Rwanda.
One has to only read the entry in the US State Department Human Rights Report 2023 on Rwanda to give a lie to the UK government’s claim that Rwanda is a safe option. According to a UK government press release, the new Act “prevents UK courts and tribunals from delaying or preventing a person’s removal to Rwanda on matters relating only to the general safety of Rwanda”. So much for judicial oversight! The UK Supreme Court ruled in November 2023 that the Rishi Sunak government’s asylum policy was unlawful. The Court said it, “allows for an exceptionally narrow route to individual challenge to ensure that the courts will interpret the relevant provisions in accordance with the will of Parliament.” Sounds familiar in so many countries! The Sunak government leaves a human right subject to the caprice of the bureaucracy! It also disapplies relevant sections of the Human Rights Act 1998. To top it all, “only a Minister of the Crown can decide whether to comply with an interim measure issued by the European Court of Human Rights.”
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has already spoken against the UK government on this issue. But the Tories have threatened to withdraw from the Convention altogether if the ECHR, applying the European Convention on Human Rights to which Britain is a state party, rules against the Act. International law may be too high a bar, but the British government should at least apply the rules-based order as defined principally by the Anglo-Saxon world and the western hemisphere!
On April 23, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volcker Turk and the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi stated, “It is critical to the protection of the human rights and dignity of refugees and migrants seeking protection that all removals from the UK are carried out after assessing their specific individual circumstances in strict compliance with international human rights and refugee law”.
Fortress Europe has been in the making for some time. The most recent of which is an April 10 policy makeover that externalises Europe’s refugee problem to countries that even by European Union (EU) human rights standards are neither safe nor secure. Even the not-too-human-rights-friendly French President, Emmanuel Macron, on April 25 took a side-swipe at the British initiative as “a betrayal of our values”. The generally Conservative party-friendly Daily Telegraph newspaper termed the move as a “voter distraction”. The next UK general elections have to be held in January 2025. However, the word on the street is it may be called as early as in the autumn this year.
The estimated number of refugees from Ukraine recorded in Europe as of March 2024 tells its own story. The numbers are as follows: UK 253,160, Germany 1,139,690, Poland 956,635, Czech Republic 381,400, Spain 192,405, Italy 168,840, Netherlands 149,015, Moldova 116,195, Slovakia 115,875, Ireland 104,315, Austria 84,135, and Romania 78,745. Denmark plans to host up to 100,000 Ukrainians and grant work permits. Clearly, being Black or Brown is not beautiful.
Australia has been sending people who come by boat to Nauru and Manus Island, Papua New Guinea since 2001. It stopped sending people in 2008 but began doing this again in 2012 and calls it “regional processing”. Not surprisingly, Israel has been doing this since 2015. Denmark passed legislation in June 2023 that would allow it to move asylum seekers to third countries outside the EU while their cases were processed.
The safe third country concept has been part of EU asylum law since the adoption of the 2005 Asylum Procedures Directive and features prominently in the European Commission’s proposals for the reform of the Asylum Acquis. Since 1999, the EU has adopted laws with the ultimate aim of establishing a Common European Asylum System with harmonised rules, procedures, and conditions. These accumulated laws are known as the Asylum Acquis. The safe third country concept “undermines access to protection in the EU within an overall strategy of containment of refugees in other regions”. The safe third country concept is seen as the panacea to Europe’s concerns by deterring applicants and allowing for expedited examination and then deflection of asylum claims. Clearly, civil servants and security wonks across the world have their heads in the clouds as far as formulating refugee policy is concerned.
Even if the UK policy stopped all the small boat crossings that PM Sunak says he wants to prevent, it would still barely touch the sides in terms of the UK’s net migration figures. In 2022, the number of people arriving by small boats was 45,744, according to the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford. Net migration the same year, according to government figures, was 745,000.
Thereby hangs a tale.
Ravi Nair is with the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre. The views expressed are personal
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