The prospect of people who have come to the UK seeking asylum being deported to Rwanda has moved a step closer, one week after the Safety of Rwanda Act was voted into law. On Monday the Home Office began an operation to detain people in dedicated centres, sooner than most had anticipated. A statement described the rounding-up of potential deportees as “the final phase of operationalising this landmark policy”.
The plan is for the first flights to take off in 10 to 12 weeks. Arrangements in Rwanda, including the 50-room “Hope hostel” near Kigali airport, have been made in accordance with the deal signed two years ago.
The policy, as this column has argued previously, is reprehensible. Refugees should not be treated as a problem to be outsourced to east Africa. Rishi Sunak’s government should never have offered to pay another country’s government to take asylum seekers – the majority of whom are Asian, not African – on the UK’s behalf. And as ought to be obvious to everyone, the fact that Rwanda has been declared legally “safe” by the UK government does not, in reality, make it so.
Last year a report from Human Rights Watch documented alarming evidence of repression, including killings, with targets including dissidents abroad as well as in Rwanda. In 2021, senior UK officials called for “investigations into allegations of extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and torture”. Earlier this year, the journalist Michela Wrong wrote about the “tide of vilification” that followed the publication of her book about the country’s leader, Paul Kagame. Evidence points to the campaign against her being professionally run.
But the commitment of Mr Sunak and his colleagues to their flagship “stop the boats” policy has trumped all such concerns. The law was changed to say that Rwanda is safe. And with the Conservatives fighting to avoid a wipeout in this week’s local elections, and Mr Sunak refusing to rule out a summer election, the deportation policy has become one of the pillars holding up what remains of his discredited government.
Obstacles to the plan remain. The Scottish government opposes deportations and public protests in Scotland have prevented them from taking place on two occasions. Lawyers will be active in seeking to prevent clients from being forced to leave the UK. In cases where people face “real, imminent and foreseeable risk of serious irreversible harm”, deportation orders should be blocked by courts. Questions remain too about which airlines will be used. And while Rwanda’s empty asylum-seeker facilities have been shown to journalists, it is not known how the system will cope with actual claimants – many of whom are likely to be desperate and disoriented.
Currently, evidence of the deterrent effect insisted on by ministers is nonexistent. Perhaps in anticipation of the Rwanda policy’s failure, politicians further to the right than Mr Sunak’s backbenchers are trialling still harsher and more extreme demands. Last week, Ben Habib, a senior figure in Reform UK, said he believed passengers on small boats should be left to drown rather than be rescued.
Such deliberate cruelty and disrespect for life should have no place in our politics. The Conservatives’ rightward journey on asylum, like that of hard-right governments elsewhere, risks taking the country to a dark place. In making the Rwanda policy so central, Mr Sunak has chosen an ugly straw to clutch at.
