Fury at UN ‘hypocrisy’ as it urges PM to scrap Rwanda f lights plan
... even though body sends asylum seekers there
THE United Nations was accused of ‘double standards’ last night after it urged the Government to abandon the Rwanda asylum scheme.
The international body’s human rights committee called on Rishi Sunak to drop the programme – even though the UN itself sends refugees to Rwanda.
The United Nations Human Rights Committee ( UNHRC) said Rishi Sunak should repeal measures already in place to allow migrants to be handed a one-way ticket to the east African nation.
A source close to Home Secretary James Cleverly said: ‘It has always been the height of irony and double standards that one arm of the UN says it has concerns about Rwanda as a country and another arm of the same organisation continually and consistently uses Rwanda to house and process asylum seekers.’
The separate UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) sent more than 2,000 asylum seekers from Libya to Rwanda aboard 15 evacuation flights between 2019 and the end of last year.
But now its international human rights panel says it is ‘deeply concerned’ about the UK’s plan, adding that it would ‘discriminate against migrants’. The committee said the Illegal Migration Act, passed last year, effectively amounted to an ‘asylum ban’.
It also expressed its ‘regrets’ over the Safety of Rwanda Bill which is designed to overcome objections set out in the Supreme Court last November, which ruled the scheme unlawful. Evidence from the UNHCR played a key role in the Supreme Court’s ruling. The new Bill is due to return to the Commons when MPs come back to Westminster following the Easter break on April 15.
Mr Sunak has said he still hoped to get planes carrying asylum seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda in the air this spring.
Earlier this month the UN declared the scheme a ‘violation of international law’. A panel of UN experts said the Rwanda measures would ‘ unduly limit judicial independence’ and called for the new Bill to be ‘reviewed and reconsidered’.
One Tory backbencher said: ‘You really couldn’t make it up. The UN’s hypocrisy is breathtaking.’
It came after a record number of migrants crossed the Channel during the first three months of the year.
Some 4,644 have reached Britain by small boat since the beginning of January, up 23 per cent on last year.
The PM’s spokesman said last week the new legislation was designed to deal with a ‘migration emergency’ and deter people from crossing the Channel in small boats. At least 75 migrants have lost their lives since the Channel crisis began five years ago.
‘It’s the height of irony’