The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom on Wednesday (November 15) rejected Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s immigration policy, which proposed to deport undocumented asylum-seekers entering the UK to Rwanda. In doing so, five judges of the highest court of law in the UK unanimously upheld an earlier ruling by the Court of Appeal, pointing to the risk of deporting refugees to the East African country. Adding that such asylum-seekers could be wrongly assessed or even returned to their countries of origin, where they might face persecution, the Court of Appeals ruled that such a policy left the deportees open to human rights breaches. A key Tory policy In April last year, then-UK PM Boris Johnson signed a deal with the Rwandan government, which would allow the UK to send some asylum-seekers to Rwanda. Johnson had hailed this move as one that would “save countless lives” from human trafficking. “Anyone entering the UK illegally … may now be relocated to Rwanda,” Johnson had said, calling the scheme “an “innovative approach, driven by our shared humanitarian impulse and made possible by Brexit freedoms”. Tory PMs after Johnson — namely Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak — continued to champion the scheme, making it a key plank of their policy to deal with migration. How it would have worked Under the scheme, people arriving in Britain as undocumented stowaways in trucks or boats, would be flown 6,400 km to Rwanda. Once there, they would be assessed for eventual resettlement in the African nation. The timeline for being deported to Rwanda could be as short as a couple of weeks, the Tory government had announced. So far, the UK government has paid its Rwandan counterpart a sum of £120 million for housing and integrating the migrants as part of the pilot scheme, which was to initially last for five years. The process of integration would theoretically also involve supporting the migrants with access to training, healthcare, and shelter so they could resettle. Treating human beings as commodities However, refugee and human rights organisations very steadfast in their opposition to this scheme, deeming it inhumane and expensive. Highlighting the dangers of transferring refugees and asylum seekers to third countries without sufficient safeguards, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) had said they must “not be traded like commodities and transferred abroad for processing.” “UNHCR remains firmly opposed to arrangements that seek to transfer refugees and asylum-seekers to third countries in the absence of sufficient safeguards and standards. Such arrangements simply shift asylum responsibilities, evade international obligations, and are contrary to the letter and spirit of the Refugee Convention,” UNHCR’s Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, Gillian Triggs, had expressed in a statement. This backlash culminated in a last-minute intervention by the European Court of Human Rights in June last year, when it stopped the first plane from departing UK for Rwanda. Following the ECHR’s intervention and timely issuance of injunctions, the first flight was cancelled, which essentially thwarted the UK government’s attempt to send the first group of migrants on a charter plane to Rwanda. The ECHR ruling also barred the UK from removing migrants through such a scheme until the completion of the legal battle against it in Britain. Subsequently, some in the government had hinted that they would even consider leaving the ECHR if it thwarted the Rwanda scheme. After this, the case went to the high court and, subsequently, the court of appeal in the UK, both of which held that the scheme was unlawful since Rwanda is not a “safe third country.” The UK government then approached the country’s apex court, challenging this decision. In its appeal, the UK government argued that although Rwanda was the site of a 1994 genocide that killed over 800,000 people, the country had since built a reputation of stability and economic progress. What did the UK’s Supreme Court rule? Pointing to Rwanda’s history of misunderstanding its obligations towards refugees, UK Supreme Court President Robert Reed said on Wednesday that the nation couldn’t be relied upon to not mistreat asylum-seekers. Citing Rwanda’s abysmal human rights record, including enforced disappearances and torture, Reed said that Rwanda practiced “refoulement,” or the practice of sending migrants back to their unsafe home countries. In its ruling, the court concluded that there exist “substantial grounds for believing that there is a real risk that asylum claims will not be determined properly and that asylum-seekers will in consequence be at risk of being returned directly or indirectly to their country of origin.” In such situations, genuine refugees will face a “real risk of ill-treatment in circumstances where they should not have been returned at all,” the court added. The court also found that Rwanda itself had a 100% rejection record for asylum-seekers coming from countries like Syria, Yemen, and Afghanistan.
