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rwanda
'Shameful': UK Conservatives Push Through Plan to Deport Asylum-Seekers to Rwanda
"The U.K. government could literally pay every refugee a £30,000 annual salary for life, and it would be cheaper," said one critic. "We're burning money just to enjoy the cruelty."
Apr 23, 2024
Legal and human rights experts on Tuesday said the British Conservative Party's decision to push through a bill allowing the government to deport asylum-seekers to Rwanda—effectively overriding last year's Supreme Court ruling—represented a "desperate low" from lawmakers eager to exploit migrants ahead of elections expected later this year.
"A lot of this is performative cruelty," Daniel Merriman, a lawyer whose clients have included some asylum-seekers whom the Tories tried to deport after it first introduced its plan in 2022, toldNPR. "The elephant in the room is the upcoming election."
After a prolonged debate, the unelected House of Lords cleared the way to pass the Safety of Rwanda bill early Tuesday morning, after dropping several proposed amendments including one that would have required independent verification that the central African country is a safe place to send migrants.
The House of Commons then passed the bill, and King Charles III is expected to formally approve the legislation in the coming days.
The bill requires courts and immigration officials to "conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country" to send asylum-seekers, even though the Supreme Court ruled in November that people deported to the country would face a significant risk of refoulement, or being sent back to the countries where they originally fled persecution or violence.
The Conservative government signed a treaty with Rwanda last December to strengthen protections for asylum-seekers, including a provision that partially bans Rwanda from sending people back to their home countries.
But the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) called on the U.K. to abandon the plan and instead "take practical measures to address irregular flows of refugees and migrants, based on international cooperation and respect for international human rights law."
"The new legislation marks a further step away from the U.K.'s long tradition of providing refuge to those in need, in breach of the Refugee Convention," said Filippo Grandi, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees. "Protecting refugees requires all countries—not just those neighboring crisis zones—to uphold their obligations. This arrangement seeks to shift responsibility for refugee protection, undermining international cooperation and setting a worrying global precedent."
"The U.K. has a proud history of effective, independent judicial scrutiny," Grandi added. "It can still take the right steps and put in place measures to help address the factors that drive people to leave home, and share responsibility for those in need of protection, with European and other international partners."
Dorothy Guerrero, head of policy and advocacy at Global Justice Now, noted that "disastrous foreign and economic policies of successive governments have contributed to the need for people to seek refuge."
"These same people's lives are continually used as a political football, after years of being scapegoats for bad government decisions," said Guerrero. "Statements from politicians are now even more blatantly devoid of any pretense of care for human rights. We will not stop pushing for a change of course, with safe routes to seek asylum in the U.K. so that people no longer have to risk their lives in the Channel."
"The passing of the Rwanda Bill is a shameful day for the U.K.," she added.
Hours after the legislation was passed, French officials announced that at least five people, including a seven-year-old child, had been killed while attempting to cross the English Channel, bound for the U.K. in an overloaded inflatable boat.
At The New Statesman, associate political editor Rachel Cunliffe wrote Tuesday that the tragedy reveals "the flaws of the Rwanda plan," which proponents say could deter migrants from seeking refuge in Britain.
Proponents of the Rwanda plan will inevitably point to today's disaster as further evidence that strong measures are needed to address the issue of Channel crossings. They will accuse Labour and opposition parties of ignoring the human cost of letting this crisis continue and argue that lives are at stake if the government does not act.
[...]
The reality is that a substantial number of people who pay people traffickers large sums of money to crowd them on to a tiny boat do so because they feel they have no other option. Fleeing war and persecution, they are desperate. And so they are prepared to take desperate measures. Measures that sometimes lead to tragedy, but which are deemed necessary given the hopelessness of their situation.
It is hard to see how the threat to send a tiny fraction of those who arrive (Rwanda has said it will only take 150-200 migrants) changes this calculation.
The Labour Party, which is leading Conservatives in polls ahead of the expected elections, has vowed to scrap the legislation if it wins control of the government later this year, and critics have expressed doubt that Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will actually secure deportation flights before Britons vote.
One flight was grounded in June 2022 after the European Court of Human Rights intervened, and on Monday the OHCHR warned aviation authorities that they would risk violating international law if they allow "unlawful removals" of asylum-seekers to Rwanda.
Critics have also pointed to a finding by the National Audit Office that the deportations would cost £1.8 million ($2.2 million) per person.
"The U.K. government could literally pay every refugee a £30,000 annual salary for life, and it would be cheaper than sending them to Rwanda," said David Andress, a history professor at the University of Portsmouth. "We're burning money just to enjoy the cruelty."
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Refuting Jurists, Lloyd Austin Says US Has No Evidence of Gaza Genocide
The U.S. defense secretary's remarks came after Sen. Elizabeth Warren and other law experts around the world asserted that Israel's Gaza onslaught meets the legal definition of genocide.
Apr 09, 2024
U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Tuesday became the latest Biden administration official to deny that Israel's six-month bombardment, invasion, and siege of Gaza constitute a genocide, a statement that came after Sen. Elizabeth Warren joined a growing number of international jurists asserting that Israeli policies and actions are genocidal under the letter of the law.
After pro-Palestine protesters wearing T-shirts with the message "Austin's Legacy = Genocide" interrupted a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing Tuesday morning, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked the Pentagon chief if Israel was committing genocide in Gaza.
"We don't have any evidence of genocide being created," Austin replied after a short pause.
After telling the defense secretary his response was "better than" the replies from CIA Director William Burns and Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines—whom Cotton said "dodged that question" before the committee last month—the senator asked Austin to respond to allegations of "greenlighting genocide" in Gaza.
"From the very beginning, we committed to help assist Israel in defending its territory and its people by providing security assistance, and I would remind everybody, you know, that what happened on October 7 was absolutely horrible," Austin said, referring to the Hamas-led attacks in which more than 1,100 Israelis and others were killed—at least some of them by so-called "friendly fire"—and over 240 others were kidnapped.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, when asked if he believes Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza: "We don't have evidence of that."
So, Israel's killing of more than 33,000 Palestinians—44% of whom are children—in 6 months, after top Israeli officials… pic.twitter.com/50cznisMxn
— Rachel Blevins (@RachBlevins) April 9, 2024
Austin's remarks followed reports that U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) told constituents that Israel's war on Gaza—which has killed and wounded more than 116,000 Palestinians including people believed dead and buried beneath rubble while displacing around 90% of the population and causing mass starvation—meets the legal definition of genocide.
"If you want to do it as an application of law, I believe that they'll find that it is genocide, and they have ample evidence to do so," Warren—a former law professor with three decades of experience—told an audience Friday at the Islamic Center of Boston in Wayland, Massachusetts.
In January, the International Court of Justice in The Hague
issued a preliminary ruling in a case brought by South Africa and supported by over 30 other nations that found Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza. The ICJ ordered Israel to prevent genocidal acts—a directive that numerous international human rights experts say is being ignored.
A March draft report by the United Nations Human Rights Council found "reasonable grounds to believe" Israel is perpetrating genocide against Palestinians.
At least hundreds of legal scholars around the world have accused Israel of genocide. So have some Israelis, including Raz Segal, one of the country's preeminent Holocaust scholars, who in October said that Israel is perpetrating "a textbook case of genocide" in Gaza.
Progressive U.S. lawmakers including Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—the only Palestinian American member of Congress—Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have also accused Israel of genocide.
“We have to re-humanise the people whose death has been normalised.”
Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez discussed her decision to use the term "genocide" in Congress when describing Israel's actions in Gaza during an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert pic.twitter.com/tKAJQTD0XT
— Middle East Eye (@MiddleEastEye) April 9, 2024
Meanwhile, President Joe Biden and members of his administration have been called genocide deniers for dismissing the assessments of legal experts on the matter, including a federal judge in California who—while absolving the United States of complicity—found that South Africa's ICJ allegations are "plausible."
In late October, Biden publicly cast doubt on Gaza casualty figures provided by Hamas-run agencies, even though Israeli and international media, human rights groups, and his own administration have relied upon those same sources—which have held up under scrutiny—for years.
In February, Austin acknowledged that "over 25,000" Palestinian women and children had been killed by Israeli forces at that point in the war, although the Pentagon subsequently attempted to walk back the defense secretary's remarks.
Biden—who early in the war declared his "unwavering, rock-solid" support for Israel—is seeking an additional $14.3 billion in armed assistance for Israel atop the nearly $4 billion it already receives from Washington. The president has also repeatedly sidestepped Congress in order to fast-track emergency military aid to the key Middle Eastern ally.
The Biden administration has approved more than 100 arms transfers to Israel during the war, including shipments of 2,000-pound bombs that can wipe out entire city blocks and have been used in some of Israel's deadliest strikes, including the October 31 bombing of the Jabalia refugee camp that killed more than 120 civilians.
Biden now wants to sell Israel $18 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets, even after the president acknowledged Israel's "indiscriminate bombing" of Gaza. In addition to progressive members of Congress—who have long opposed unconditional U.S. military aid to Israel—a growing number of centrist Democrats, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who recently called on the FBI to investigate peace activists demanding a Gaza cease-fire, are now urging Biden to halt arms transfers to Israel.
The United States—which committed genocide against the Indigenous peoples of North America—has a long history of supporting genocidal regimes. Since the end of World War II, the U.S. has provided military, financial, and diplomatic support for the perpetrators of genocides in Guatemala, Paraguay, Bangladesh, Kurdistan, and East Timor.
The U.S. has also been accused of turning a blind eye to genocides in countries from Nazi Germany to Rwanda, which on Sunday marked the 30th anniversary of the mass murder of around 800,000 people, most of them ethnic Tutsis, in a campaign of state-sanctioned slaughter.
During her speech, Warren said that responses to Gaza should transcend a "labels argument."
"For me, it is far more important to say what Israel is doing is wrong. And it is wrong," she said. "It is wrong to starve children within a civilian population in order to try to bend to your will. It is wrong to drop 2,000-pound bombs in densely populated civilian areas."
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British Supreme Court Rules UK Can't Deport Refugees to Rwanda
"The only responsible, effective, and decent response to this judgement should be to get down to the serious task of fairly and efficiently determining people's claims," said one rights advocate.
Nov 15, 2023
Rights advocates in the United Kingdom on Wednesday called on the Conservative government to finally abandon its efforts to detain and deport asylum-seekers after the British Supreme Court ruled that a proposal to send refugees to the East African country of Rwanda violated domestic and international law and could not move forward.
Speaking for five justices on the court, Justice Robert Reed said the Supreme Court agreed with an earlier ruling by the British Court of Appeal, which had found that refugees sent to Rwanda faced a significant risk of refoulement, or being sent back to the countries where they originally fled persecution or violence.
"We agree with their conclusion," said Reed.
The judge pointed out that Britain follows the legal principle of non-refoulement under the United Nations Refugee Convention and several other international agreements.
"It is a core principle of international law, to which the United Kingdom government has repeatedly committed itself on the international stage," Reed said.
Despite this fact, former Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced the plan to send asylum-seekers to Rwanda in 2022, and his successor, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, pledged to follow through on the effort.
The government has already paid Rwanda 140 million pounds (nearly $175 million) with the intention of deporting anyone who used "illegal, dangerous, or unnecessary methods" to reach the U.K., including on small boats. More than 45,000 people crossed the English Channel on small vessels in 2022.
A deportation flight was scheduled for June 14, 2022, but a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights forced the government to ground the plane, which was carrying a man who had sought refuge in England after leaving Iraq. Subsequent legal challenges kept other refugees from being sent to Rwanda.
Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, who was fired this week after saying unhoused people had made a "lifestyle choice" and claiming London police were biased toward pro-Palestinian rights protesters, had said it was her "dream" to send refugees to Rwanda and had pushed for the U.K. to exit the European Convention on Human Rights in order to move forward with the policy.
"That 'dream' has just been ruled to be unlawful by the Supreme Court," said Member of Parliament Zarah Sultana. "Let's make sure that's the end of these cruel and callous anti-migrant policies."
Agnes Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International, called the ruling one piece of good news in an "ocean of horrific sufferings."
Amnesty International U.K.'s chief executive, Sacha Deshmukh, called on new Home Secretary James Cleverly to "not only abandon the idea of doing a deal with Rwanda, but to scrap the underlying policy of refusing to process people's asylum claims and the Illegal Migration Act that has entrenched that dismal policy."
The law, which passed in July, states that anyone who arrives in the U.K. via small boats or other "unsafe" methods will have their asylum claim deemed "inadmissable."
"This policy has made complete chaos of the U.K.'s asylum system and this shameful deal has simply exacerbated the mess," said Deshmukh. "The only responsible, effective, and decent response to this judgement should be to get down to the serious task of fairly and efficiently determining people's claims."
"The idea that the U.K. should withdraw from the European Convention to pursue this failed policy is nonsensical and should be immediately binned," he added. "The government should make policies which fit with the law, not fit the law around their policies."
Nearly 130 U.K. rights organizations signed a joint statement on Wednesday welcoming the Supreme Court's ruling and and urging the government to "protect the rights of people who have come to our country in search of sanctuary."
"While we welcome the decision today, we remain concerned by this government's overall treatment of people who move to their country," said the groups, including the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants (JCWI), the Scottish Refugee Council, and the Muslim Council of Britain. "We know that as a community we are compassionate and welcoming, and we need immigration policies that are rooted in that same care, compassion, and respect for human rights."
The JCWI noted that Sunak's government could still try to move forward with the Rwanda deal "in a different form, such as a treaty which would need to go through Parliament."
"Our fight continues!" said the group. "Although immediate removal risks are reduced, challenges persist. Let's resist hostile policies and safeguard the universal right to seek asylum in the U.K."
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