United Kingdom: Shipping migrants off to Rwanda
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is speeding ahead with his “reprehensible” plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, said The Guardian in an editorial. After two years of court injunctions and legislative tinkering, his government’s “stop the boats” law was finally passed last week, and raids to round up potential deportees have already begun. Sunak says the law is meant to deter asylum seekers from piling into rickety, unseaworthy boats and trying to reach British shores. But the policy reeks of “deliberate cruelty.” The asylum seekers he plans to dump in East Africa are mostly Asians and Middle Easterners, not Africans. Many have fled extremist repression in countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, seeking a better life in Britain. Instead, they will be flown to Rwanda, a place where Human Rights Watch has documented repression and even killing of dissidents, and British diplomats have warned of “enforced disappearances and torture.” Enacting this policy “risks taking the country to a dark place.”
Yet something had to be done, said The Times in an editorial. The flow of migrants across the English Channel from France is overwhelming our resources and putting the migrants themselves in terrible jeopardy. More than 6,000 have made the perilous trip already this year, and just last week, five of them—including a 7-year-old girl—died when their “treacherously overcrowded dinghy” sank. Sunak’s Rwanda resettlement plan is “an honest attempt” to solve this “human crisis” by deterring future crossings. It’s not as if Labour has any better ideas, said The Standard in an editorial. Even if the opposition could magically clear the backlog of over 90,000 unprocessed asylum claims, as it has promised to do if elected, it has offered no plan for dealing with “those whose claims are rejected.” Yes, we have to pay Rwanda to take in the migrants. But right now Britain is “spending enormous sums” paying the French to stop them from crossing, and that’s not working out—30,000 arrived last year.
This is no solution, but a dystopian policy that could have been “dreamt up by George Orwell,” said Le Monde (France) in an editorial. Britain’s own Supreme Court vetoed Sunak’s plan last year, ruling that Rwanda was not a “safe third country” as designated under international law. The court pointed out that the African nation is menaced by armed rebels on its borders and is staunchly intolerant of LGBTQ people.
Yet rather than abide by the ruling, Parliament simply passed a law declaring Rwanda to be safe. It was a “despicable political maneuver,” unworthy of “Europe’s oldest democracy.” If the point is to deter channel crossings, it’s not going to work, said Adam Sage in The Times. Of all the migrants I talked to in Calais, the port from which most set sail for England, only a few Iranians said the new policy might cause them “second thoughts.” Most, including people from Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Sudan, and South Sudan, said they were determined to get on a boat, no matter what. “We want to find a good life in Britain,” said Fahad, 33, a member of Kuwait’s repressed Bedoon minority. “If they send me to Rwanda, I will kill myself.”