Immigration plan doesn’t make sense

“QUICK, quick, the Prime Minister (the actual Prime Minister!) has been found to have broken the law and has been fined by the Metropolitan Police!

“We need a distraction. What was that thing you wrote on the back of a post-it-note at the last brainstorming meeting? Ah yes, that was it, send those seeking asylum in the UK to Africa.”

These are the imagined frenzied conversations taking place in Number 10 when this policy was cooked up. You can almost visualise Home Secretary Priti Patel throwing a dart at a map of Africa to decide.

It is a policy that smells of havingbeen designed as a distraction technique, but even a cursory glance shows just how preposterous an illthought-out idea it is.

A mere 10 months ago a statement by the UK’s international ambassador for human rights Rita French said she was concerned Rwanda was not conducting “transparent, credible and independent investigations into allegations of human rights violations including deaths in custody and torture”.

She then added: “We were disappointed that Rwanda did not support the UK recommendation to screen, identify and provide support to trafficking victims, including those held in government transit centres.”

But now the country, which has seen genocide within the last three decades, is seen as the best place to send vulnerable asylum seekers guilty of nothing more than wanting a better life. To amplify this point the UK has itself granted asylum or humanitarian protection to 69 Rwandans within the past decade.

To be fair Rwanda does have experience dealing with refugees as it already hosts more than 127,000 refugees, mainly from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Of these most are languishing in refugee camps and are not allowed to work.

Today we report on how the plans have been condemned by a leading figure at the UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugee agency, as not just a “breach of international law” but also of human rights law and refugee law.

It simply isn’t acceptable to take an issue as serious in terms of human lives as immigration and use it as a distraction from lawbreaking at the very top of the administration.

This isn’t to say that tackling trafficking gangs shouldn’t be high on the to-do list, it absolutely should.

However, it is the very fact this issue is so urgent that makes the decision to rush through such a pie-in-the-sky policy all the more contemptible.