UK backs Rwanda migration bill
Approval buys time for Sunak as some blast plan
LONDON — British lawmakers have voted Tuesday to support the government’s plan to send some asylum-seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda, keeping alive a policy that has angered human rights groups and cost the United Kingdom at least $300 million, without a single flight getting off the ground.
The House of Commons voted 313-269 to approve the government’s Rwanda bill in principle, sending it on for further scrutiny. The result averts a defeat that would have left Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s authority in tatters and his government teetering. It buys Sunak some breathing space, but tees up further wrangling in the coming weeks.
The bill seeks to overcome a ruling by the UK Supreme Court that the plan to send migrants who reach Britain across the English Channel in boats to Rwanda — where they would stay permanently — is illegal.
Normally Tuesday’s vote would have been a formality. Sunak’s Conservatives have a substantial majority, and the last time a government bill was defeated at its first Commons vote — known as second reading — was in 1986.
But the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill faces criticism both from Conservative centrists who think it skirts with breaking international law, and from lawmakers on the party’s authoritarian right, who say it doesn’t go far enough to ensure migrants who arrive without permission can be deported.
After threatening to block the bill on Tuesday, many of the hard-liners abstained in hopes of toughening it up later in the legislative process. The government was so nervous about the result that it ordered Climate Minister Graham Stuart to fly back from the COP28 summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where negotiations are in their final hours, for the vote.
After the vote, Sunak said on social media “the British people should decide who gets to come to this country — not criminal gangs or foreign courts. That’s what this Bill delivers.”
The Rwanda plan is an expensive, highly controversial policy that hasn’t sent a single person so far to the East African country. But it has become a totemic issue for Sunak, central to his pledge to “stop the boats” bringing unauthorized migrants to the UK across the English Channel from France. More than 29,000 people have done so this year, down from 46,000 in all of 2022.
Sunak believes delivering on his promise will allow the Conservatives to close a big opinionpoll gap with the opposition Labour Party before an election that must be held in the next year.
The plan has already cost the government at least $300 million in payments to Rwanda, which agreed in 2022 to process and settle hundreds of asylumseekers a year. Sunak believes that will deter migrants from making the hazardous journeys and break the business model of people-smuggling gangs.
Human rights groups say the plan is unworkable and it is unethical to send asylum-seekers to a country more than 4,000 miles away, with no hope of returning. They also cite Rwanda’s poor human rights record, including allegations of torture and killings of government opponents.
Sacha Deshmukh, chief executive of Amnesty International UK, called the bill an “outrageous attack on the very concept of universal human rights.”