The UK government’s plans to send asylum seekers to Rwanda had generated controversy even before the former home secretary Priti Patel signed a deal with the east African country in April last year sealing the deal. Ministers claimed the plan would deter people from making the dangerous journey across the Channel on small boats.
On Monday, a case examining the legality of the policy reaches the UK’s highest court, the supreme court. The political stakes for ministers are high but the asylum seekers threatened with being forcibly removed to Rwanda say their lives are at stake if the policy is greenlit.
What is the supreme court case about?
The high court found the Rwanda policy lawful in December last year, but in June this year the court of appeal subsequently found it to be unlawful by a majority of two to one. The Home Office is appealing against that ruling. Its lawyers are arguing that the court of appeal was wrong to conclude that removal to Rwanda would breach article 3 of the European convention on human rights, which prohibits torture and inhuman or degrading treatment. They say the UK government’s agreement with Rwanda contains assurances that asylum seekers would be treated properly.
There are also appeals by some of the asylum seekers threatened with deportation to Rwanda, who argue that the home secretary failed to look properly at Rwanda’s procedures and whether there was a risk of ill-treatment there or refoulement – being forcibly returned to their home country where their life might be at risk.
How many asylum seekers will be sent to Rwanda?
There have been conflicting reports. Initially a figure of a few hundred people was floated, then the government said there was no ceiling on numbers. In undercover filming carried out by the campaign group Led By Donkeys, the Rwandan ambassador to the UK, Johnston Busingye, said up to 5,000 people could be sent. But immigration detention centres do not have capacity to detain tens of thousands of asylum seekers and most airlines have refused to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda. Earlier this year, the government’s air partner, AirTanker, told the Guardian: “AirTanker has no intention of operating deportation flights to Rwanda.”
Will asylum seekers who arrive in the UK ever be sent to Rwanda?
The home secretary, Suella Braverman, has said it is her “dream” that this will happen. Rwanda has already been paid £140m even though nobody has yet been sent there. If the supreme court finds the Rwanda policy to be lawful, the asylum seekers involved in the case may appeal to the European court. Although the high court found the Rwanda policy to be lawful, the judges found flaws in the way Home Office processed individual cases of those earmarked for the first flight. It may be more difficult than ministers initially thought to airlift asylum seekers en masse out of the UK and leave them thousands of miles away.
