As has been set out clearly in this blog recently, and as anyone with a remote amount of sense can tell, Rishi Sunak’s five priorities are not going well. One out of five, and that one being by chance instead of by policy, is not the best record for a party doing all it can to cling to power, but they quite plainly do not have an alternative plan, and to deviate now and abandon these “priorities” without accomplishing them would demonstrate the utmost cowardice and weakness, as if this hasn’t been demonstrated already over the past fourteen years.
The focus of this article will be the last one, “stop the boats” the one Sunak seems to have pushed all of his chips onto. The lynchpin of this pledge is the Rwanda Asylum Plan, a policy I have covered before here, but one that is now so essential to the Government’s strategy for re-election that it warrants a second article.
The premise of the Rwanda plan is well-known to those who have been keeping up with domestic politics, so you won’t have to read the details of it here again. The political complexities that arise from it, both domestic and international, are what will be explored below.
I think we’re all in agreement at this point, that even if the plan gets the green lights and desperate refugees are callously flown off to Rwanda, the boats aren’t going to stop. Those crossing the Channel aren’t nearly as stupid as Sunak and his cabinet think they are; they’ll know the statistics, they’ll know that only a few hundred migrants will be flown there each year out of the thousands who take the risk to cross. And they, having avoided war, persecution, and in some cases almost certain death, will like those odds.
However, a great portion of the nation wants something done about these boats. It’s not nearly as existential a threat as the Mail and Express like to tell us it is, but those who use those rags for anything other than toilet paper, the Tory base, want solutions. Sunak needs to at least look like he’s trying his best for them.
He knows the boats aren’t going to stop, but if he manages to get the first plane off the ground, he can keep chanting his mantra of, “stick to the plan”, the same chant they use of the economy, the NHS, public services, housing, etc. What “stick to the plan” boils down to, is an acknowledgement that this country, compared to where it was 20 years ago, is fucked. So how do the Tories, being the ones who did the fucking, expect to also be the ones to un-fuck the situation?
I digress. The Rwanda plan, for all their talk of “compassion”, is the antithesis of a compassionate policy, not differentiating between those migrants who come here out of genuine fear for their safety, and those very few who cross for selfish, economic reasons. Indeed, the UK’s Refugee Council has found that up to 90% of all those who cross the Channel in small boats are genuine refugees. This is contrary to statements made by the Government, who have said previously that the majority of small boat migrants are economic migrants, without citing any evidence and without consulting the ONS, who have asked for the Government’s sources for that claim, and have yet to receive an answer.
The plan was originally thought up by the comic book villain Home Secretary Priti Patel, and carried forwards by Suella Braverman, another character straight out of a scary children’s book. It’s not one that Sunak believes in, or agrees with the politics of. Regardless of if the plan works or not, if crossings go up or down after the flights take off, or if they take off at all, Sunak is destined for the U-bend of British political history. Nevertheless, he’s invested all of his political capital, and thereby the future of his party, on its success.
I should have probably started by clarifying for anyone who still doubted it; Rwanda is not a safe country for refugees. This is a fact with broad legal consensus, agreed upon by the UK Supreme Court, UK Court of Appeal, UK Divisional Courts, and, most frustratingly for the hard-line Tories, the ECHR. Whilst all agree that the concept of sending asylum seekers to a safe third country is lawful, sending them to Rwanda is not lawful because, to emphasise, Rwanda is not a safe country for refugees.
All of the courts have found that those sent to Rwanda have a high risk of “refoulment”, a legal term meaning refugees sent there are likely to be sent back to the countries they were originally fleeing, facing arbitrary arrest, torture, or cruel and degrading treatment. So, instead of coming up with a better, more humane and moral plan to prevent Channel crossings, like cooperating with the EU to attack the business model of people smuggling gangs (impossible for the current Tory party, who are ideologically incapable of working with the EU), the Government has passed the “Safety of Rwanda Act”, ordering all UK legal institutions to treat Rwanda as a safe country.
This is a gross abuse of Parliamentary sovereignty. The UK Parliament is among the most powerful in the world, being able to pass anything, literally anything into law with a simple majority. In this case, it has chosen to write a lie into our statute books, essentially saying black is white, and that Rwanda is safe.
This is a nation that has a bloodstained record of their treatment of refugees, a recorded history of sending them back to their places of origin. On the same day Priti Patel signed the “Memorandum of Understanding” with the Rwandan Government, laying the groundwork for this plan, Rwanda sent a Syrian national back to Syria to an unknown fate, breaking international law. There are at least 100 known cases of refoulment of refugees in Rwanda, so egregious that the UN had to step in at one point to prevent Eritrean nationals in Rwanda being sent home via Kenya. Israel had a similar agreement with Rwanda between 2013-15, but after the Israeli Supreme Court also found a high risk of refoulment, the agreement was dismantled.
The current Rwandan Government under the unelected autocrat Paul Kagame has little regard for international law when it comes to refoulment of refugees, but it also has little regard for the lives of these refugees as well. In May 2018, twelve unarmed Congolese refugees were shot dead by Rwandan police for peacefully protesting against a 25% cut in food rations. The police officers in question have not been held to account by their Government.
There is also an ongoing war between Rwanda and Rwandan-backed militias (including M23, a group accused of multiple murders, rapes, and war crimes in the Congo), and Congolese forces and militias in the rural eastern states of the DRC. There are Congolese refugees in the UK who, under this legislation, are likely to be sent to the very nation funding and facilitating war crimes against their countrymen. When Government Minister and political masochist Chris Philp was questioned about this on BBC Question Time by an Brit of Congolese descent, Chris didn’t even know Rwanda and the DRC were different countries.
the Tory Government itself does not consider Rwanda to be a safe place for its own citizens; FCDO travel advice for Rwanda states that LGBTQ+ people are institutionally discriminated against in Rwanda and abused by local authorities. Many refugees fleeing to the UK do so because we are a tolerant and inclusive place for the LGBTQ+ community, yet this Government would send them to a nation that would, according to the Government itself, abuse them.
Perhaps it is for these reasons the Rwanda plan has been kept alive by Sunak. It’s clear that Rwanda cannot be trusted to uphold international law, and is prone to killing refugees who disagree with how it treats them, and herein lies the real deterrent; he seeks to strike fear into the some of the already most fearful people in the world, that they may face forced return to the places they were fleeing, or death if they complain about it whilst they’re there.
During its passage through Parliament, there have been numerous attempts to make the Safety of Rwanda Act more reasonable, most notably by the House of Lords. The Upper House has tried to insist that Rwanda is made to uphold its international obligations, or that those who have worked for or aided UK armed forces abroad wouldn’t be sent to Rwanda under this law, but both proposals were rejected by the Tories in the House of Commons, and I genuinely cant think of a reason why other than them trying to be as mean as possible.
The Lords kept on trying to make the Act more humane, but Sunak didn’t budge. He told Parliament on the evening on 22 April that they would vote through the night if necessary to get this Act passed exactly how he wanted it, and after he threw this tantrum, the Lords capitulated, recognising the primacy of the elected House, and let the Act pass. Sunak and his Government blamed what they called “unelected Labour Lords” for the delay in passing the Act, when in fact the majority of dissent came from Crossbench peers, such as judges, Q/KCs, and other legal experts.
Due to this Act, refugees can no longer bring a legal challenge against the policy as a whole, but can still appeal on an individual basis. These challenges can still be brought before the ECHR, but if the ECHR rules in favour of the Asylum seeker, the Act has a built-in contradiction of international law, forcing UK civil servants to ignore the ECHR and send them to Rwanda anyway. But civil servants are, by their own code, prohibited from breaking international law, turning any situation that may arise from this into a proper legal clusterfuck.
Hopefully an excess of individual legal challenges, delays by civil servants, and cock-ups with Government procurement of aircraft will push the first take-offs back until the General Election, whereupon a new (hopefully) Labour Government will repeal the Act as soon as possible.
stay safe
/e