UNHCR says new legislation breaches Refugee Convention and undermines international cooperation
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill successfully completed its progress through Parliament last night after the House of Lords eventually relented and let the Bill pass.
Image credit: WikipediaIt is excepted that the Bill will receive Royal Assent today, becoming the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said yesterday that the first flight to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda would be in 10 to 12 weeks and there would then be "a regular rhythm of multiple flights every month over the summer and beyond until the boats are stopped".
Filippo Grandi, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), reaffirmed in a statement today that the new Act would breach international law.
Grandi said: "The new legislation marks a further step away from the UK's long tradition of providing refuge to those in need, in breach of the Refugee Convention. Protecting refugees requires all countries – not just those neighbouring crisis zones – to uphold their obligations. This arrangement seeks to shift responsibility for refugee protection, undermining international cooperation and setting a worrying global precedent."
He called on the UK Government to reconsider its plans, adding: "The UK has a proud history of effective, independent judicial scrutiny. It can still take the right steps and put in place measures to help address the factors that drive people to leave home, and share responsibility for those in need of protection with European and other international partners."
Volker Türk, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, warned the new Act seriously hinders the rule of law in the UK.
"By shifting responsibility for refugees, reducing the UK's courts' ability to scrutinise removal decisions, restricting access to legal remedies in the UK and limiting the scope of domestic and international human rights protections for a specific group of people, this new legislation seriously hinders the rule of law in the UK and sets a perilous precedent globally. 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."
Two United Nations human rights experts warned yesterday that removals to Rwanda would be unlawful and any airlines or aviation regulators facilitating the removals could be complicit in violating internationally protected human rights and court orders.
The experts stressed that removing asylum-seekers to Rwanda, where they would be at risk of refoulement, would violate the right to be free from torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Over 250 NGOs wrote an open letter to the Prime Minister today to express outrage at the new legislation, calling it "a shameful and performatively cruel law" that will put people seeking safety at grave risk of mental and physical harm.
"Despite the clear ruling from the Supreme Court, the Government is rewriting the facts so they can shirk our responsibilities to refugees. In doing so, the Government would break international law and further shatter the UK's commitment to justice and the rule of law. While this is a targeted attack on refugees and migrants, an attack on one group's rights is an attack on all of us," the NGOs said.
The Council of Europe's Commissioner for Human Rights, Michael O'Flaherty, said in a statement today that the adoption of the Bill raises major issues about the human rights of asylum seekers and the rule of law in the UK more generally.
O'Flaherty stated: "I am concerned that the Rwanda Bill enables the implementation of a policy of removing people to Rwanda without any prior assessment of their asylum claims by the UK authorities in the majority of cases. Specifically, the Bill prevents individuals faced with removal to Rwanda from accessing remedies for potential violations of the absolute prohibition of refoulement, while it also significantly excludes the ability of UK courts to fully and independently scrutinise the issues brought before them."
Enver Solomon, CEO of the Refugee Council, said the new Act was 'Orwellian' and will simply exacerbate chaos in the asylum system at huge cost to the taxpayer.
He continued: "Even on the Government's best-case scenario, the Rwanda scheme will remove no more than 5,000 people a year out of the tens of thousands of people shut out of the asylum system. Inexplicably, the Government would rather pay to look after them indefinitely than simply grant them a fair hearing on UK soil to decide who can settle here. What's more, the Government has never been able to produce any evidence that the Rwanda scheme will deter refugees coming to the UK. The Prime Minister reportedly believed the 'deterrent won't work' when he was Chancellor.
"The truth is that the Rwanda scheme is a headline grabbing plan for soundbites and slogans. It will not do anything to fix the Government's broken asylum system. To actually create a fair and controlled asylum system, we need fast and accurate decision-making on asylum claims. That might not sound as flashy as the Rwanda scheme, but the principle of a fair hearing is what underpins the global rulebook for refugees that the UK helped write after WWII. The Government must stop wasting time and money and get back to processing asylum claims."
Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International UK's Chief Executive, said in a press release that the passing of the Bill was a "national disgrace" and leaves a stain on the UK's moral reputation.
"The bill is built on a deeply authoritarian notion attacking one of the most basic roles played by the courts - the ability to look at evidence, decide on the facts of a case and apply the law accordingly. It's absurd that the courts are forced to treat Rwanda as a 'safe country' and forbidden from considering all evidence to the contrary. Switching off human rights protections for people who the Government thinks it can gain political capital from attacking sets an extremely dangerous precedent," Deshmukh added.
On the Bill's first return to the Lords yesterday, Lord Anderson of Ipswich KC called it a 'post-truth Bill'.
He said with regard to the Bill's declaration that Rwanda is always to be considered a safe country: "Bluntly, we are asked to be complicit in a present-day untruth and a future fantasy, by making a factual judgment not backed by evidence, then by declaring that this judgment must stand for all time, irrespective of the true facts—this in the context not of some technical deeming provision in the tax code but of a factual determination on a matter of huge controversy on which the safety of human beings will depend. This is a post-truth Bill. To adapt a phrase we have often heard from the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, it takes the culture of justification, which is a trademark of this House, and replaces it with a culture of assertion. It takes hopes and rebadges them as facts. It uses the sovereign status of this Parliament as a shield from scrutiny, and it makes a mockery of this Bill."
Lord Anderson added that the cost of the new law "will be measured not only in money but in principles debased—disregard for our international commitments, avoiding statutory protections for the vulnerable, and the removal of judicial scrutiny over the core issue of the safety of Rwanda."