Rwanda plan is shocking

The Government’s scheme to send people seeking asylum 4,000 miles away to Rwanda is shocking, and history suggests this disastrously ill-conceived plan will end badly.

Seven years ago, Israel struck a deal to send refugees and people seeking asylum to Rwanda. The scheme was abandoned. But not before people had suffered serious human rights abuses in Rwanda leaving many to embark on new journeys, controlled by smugglers and other abusers, in search of refuge.

Australia’s infamous “offshoring” schemes with Nauru, Manus Island and Papua New Guinea also provide a stark warning. The Australian authorities have spent vast sums of money to prop up a cruel project based on deliberately marooning people in isolated locations where predictably - mental illness and cases of self-harm have been rife.

To repeat these failed schemes represents a shameful abandonment of the UK’s responsibility to refugees under the Refugee Convention.

Meanwhile, the Government’s draconian Nationality and Borders Bill is set to criminalise many people seeking asylum in the UK.

As we’ve seen from terrible crises in Afghanistan and Ukraine, from tragic drownings in the Mediterranean and the Channel, and from numerous other zones of conflict and persecution, our world needs to provide humane and efficient means for desperate people to seek safety.

To this country’s everlasting shame, Priti Patel’s toxic anti-refugee policies are rapidly destroying our own asylum system as well as setting a terrible example to the world.

Dr Anne M McFarlane, Reading Group Secretary, Amnesty International UK