Rwanda Plan: breakdown of the judgment

This article will summarise the key facts of the recent High Court ruling on the UK government’s policy of sending unsuccessful asylum seekers to Rwanda, the critiques of the ruling as well as the implications the ruling will have on the future of immigration control and human rights. This article will also explore whether the Rwanda policy is an effective deterrent against small boat crossings and an effective use of the public purse and resources. 

In December 2022, the UK High Court passed an influential and controversial judgment. In the judgment, the Court held that the government’s much criticised policy to send unsuccessful asylum seekers to Rwanda is lawful. The case at the Court involved eight asylum seekers from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Vietnam, Albania and Sudan who argued that their asylum requests should be reviewed in the UK and not in Rwanda, reasoning that their claims would not be sufficiently examined in the country. They also argued that the Home Secretary’s legal analysis, which surmised that the East-Central African country was a “safe country”, was flawed. Asylum seekers highlighted that if sent to Rwanda, they would face maltreatment, which would amount to a human rights violation, and contended that the UK government sharing their data with the Rwandan authorities before their claims had been concluded was unlawful. Other arguments contested the fairness of government procedure, highlighting how it punishes asylum seeking (which is against international law) and discriminates against young male asylum seekers from countries (except Ukraine). The case saw interventions from NGOs, one border force officers’ union as well as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The Court disagreed with the asylum seekers, finding that the Home Secretary had taken reasonable steps in her analysis to conclude that Rwanda is a “safe country”. The Court also maintained this despite human rights abuses against dissidents and political asylum seekers, as highlighted by the asylum seekers’ legal team. Furthermore, it is permissible for the Home Office to contact Rwandan authorities regarding an asylum application before its conclusion and lawful to share data before an application is settled, if reasoned in the name of public interest. Against the grain of public opinion, the Court found that any indirect discrimination against male asylum seekers of certain nationalities is justified. The judgment also found that the process used for the Rwanda decisions is fair and that there is no need for asylum seekers to have legal representation during the process or legal advice before their screening interview. The Court concluded that the policy does not punish asylum seekers.

Since the UK is party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, has the High Court erred in its ruling that the Rwanda policy does not violate Article 31 (non-penalty for “illegal” entry) and Article 33 (non-refoulement) of the Convention? Arguably, yes. It is baffling that the Court considered credible human rights reports (from Human Rights Watch and the General Human Rights in Rwanda) to be irrelevant to its analysis of Rwanda as a safe country. These reports specifically highlight the treatment of protesting asylum seekers and political dissidents respectively. Sending those fleeing persecution to a country with an unsatisfactory human rights record does little but extend their suffering. Furthermore, the government’s travel advice on Rwanda states that LGBTQIA+ people suffer discrimination and abuse, “including from local authorities”, and that there is a lack of legal protection for LGBTQIA+ people. Enver Solomon (Chief Executive of the Refugee Council) wrote in The Guardian that the policy “takes punishment of fellow human beings to a new level“.

This case shows that the “depressing and distressing” policy is here to stay (unless there is success on the partial appeal at the Court of Appeal). It is also a stark reminder of the state of human rights post-Brexit, as the Home Office does not need to do a thorough examination of the asylum seekers’ claims, since EU law no longer applies to the UK. This fits into the backdrop of a wider regression of human rights which have been upheld by the judiciary when challenged (e.g: the deprivation of citizenship in the Shamima Begum case). Given that the government is considering leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, the precedent set by this case will play a more significant role in future deportations to Rwanda, as asylum seekers will not have the protection of the ECHR to challenge any Home Office decision. 

Until then, the next steps will be the Court of Appeal, with no flights commencing whilst appeals are underway, and continued advocacy by Asylum NGOs and legal teams on an individual case by case basis. The operation and impact of the Rwanda Plan still remains to be seen, however the Australian offshoring model provides the UK with a cautionary tale: it did not intercept the smuggling business model, slow migration numbers nor protect refugees from criminal gangs. It also created the highest rates of mental illness amongst detainees ever recorded.

To those who oppose the Rwanda Plan, the silver lining remains the huge undertaking of an offshoring scheme. The Home Office will need to make “legally defensible decisions in individual cases” to deport anyone, and UK 2021 figures show only 113 asylum seekers were successfully removed. Leading immigration barrister Colin Yeo stresses the history of abandoned Home Office schemes and suggests the plan serves more as a “distraction from the asylum backlog and other issues”. On the other side of the process, Rwanda has only agreed to accept a few hundred asylum seekers per year, which begs the question – with £140 million already banked, could its government be relying on a failure within the chain of command? In any case, Rwanda has no need to overextend its end of the bargain. 

Set against a historical low in successful deportations, the Rwanda Plan reveals more than a hemorrhage of time and public resources, but a UK government with little to offer. Instead of building an accessible asylum system with opportunities for refugee self-reliance, the ‘out of sight’ mentality remains the UK’s preferred option. With maze-like bureaucracy and a huge asylum backlog, is the Home Office even benefitting from further unworkable proposals? And most importantly – is offshoring our problems really a sustainable approach? 

Everyday Islamophobia: Is France still a country of Human Rights?

As a child in France, you grow up with the patriotic idea that France is a great country doing all she can to protect human rights internationally.

Ever since our famous revolution, when we created the so-called universal declaration of Men’s rights, it is our universal duty to protect others. In this declaration, the word Men, Homme in French, was preferred to the gender-neutral Human, Humain, which in itself shows that the declaration in its essence was not made to be totally universal. 

After leaving France 5 years ago, I became disillusioned with this national propaganda. I truly believe that our poor human rights situation in France is deeply intertwined with the bad treatment of its Muslim population. This article will draw on the problems of French colonisation to explain the current climate of tension around the French Muslim community.

So let’s start with colonisation. It is useless to say that this was problematic, because of torture, oppression, repression and so forth. The decolonisation period was as brutal. Let’s take the most extreme example, the Algerian war, where French perpetrators of torture remain unpunished today. This war showed another facet of France to the world. It showed that France was able to torture and censor for the good cause of human rights. Films like the Bataille d’Alger, demonstrating the widespread use of colonial torture, remained censored in France until 2004. Is a country that tortures and censors a country of human rights? 

The consequences of the decolonisation wars in France were varied, including heavy flows of migrants to France from former colonies. These migrants who became French remain marginalised, in part because of insufficient integration strategies being implemented by the French government.

Consequently, migrants are relegated to colossal, precarious buildings on the city outskirts; the infamous banlieues.

This marginalisation of migrants, along with a deeply entrenched sense of injustice, appeared with the end of colonisation for some French, and many other factors led to an increase of racism.

A good example of the national rise of racism in the decolonisation period is the creation of the Front National (FN) in 1972. The party was conceived by Jean-Marie Le Pen, a former general of the Algerian war who was known to have used torture against Algerian freedom fighters. This party is known to be negationist, populist, extremist and to gather many racist, antisemitic and islamophobic members and supporters.

As stated in Hanna Uihlein’s piece, racism and Islamophobia are two distinct but often intertwined concepts. Islamophobia in France is inextricably linked to racism towards people originally from the Magreb. But Islamophobia is also problematically linked with our state, our laws, and our concept of secularism.

The legal separatism of Church and State in 1905 resulted in strict secular laws. In the French concept of laïcité, religion is strictly personal and should not be visible to others. It has resulted in the headscarves being banned in some public spaces such as schools, but also for teachers and journalists who have to choose between wearing their headscarf or practising their jobs.

This lack of religious freedom in the public sphere also creates a climate of tension and hate, as erasing Muslims women wearing headscarves from public spaces others them. This climate of otherness can also be felt by the rest of the population as it is a well-known fact that police heavily uses ethnic profiling when arresting people in the street.

Hence, when French Muslims express their view on caricatures being problematic, maybe displaced, they do not really complain about these cartoons, it is the general feeling of Islamophobia in French society that they decry.

They protest the systematic discrimination, their marginalisation, unequal violent police treatment. They complain about France being racist and Islamophobic.

This is an historical problem and the questionable situation of human rights in France is directly linked to the mistreatment of the Muslim population.

To the question of whether France is still a country of human rights, I respond: has it ever been one? Is a country that is sexist, racist, Islamophobic a country of Human Rights? Is a country that only considers white men’s rights as human rights able to claim the role of protecting human rights universally? 

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Imagining Home: Exploring the Politics of Space and Identity through Poetry

In Italo Calvino’s book, Invisible Cities, a fictional Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan dozens of different cities he claims to have visited. Yet each distinct description in fact describes one city: Venice. Like Marco Polo’s Venice, the homeland of an immigrant is created and re-created many times in the imagination, shaped by what is remembered and what is forgotten, letters from loved ones left behind, news handed person to person. Each homeland is distinct to the immigrant who imagines it, and yet the vision of a single homeland connects all immigrants from a particular place.

Winner of the 2018–2019 International Migration and Diaspora Politics Poetry Contest, this poem draws from themes encountered during the course to explore the idea of imagined homelands in the context of immigration.

What time is it in Jo’burg?

You can never tell the time 

here, with the grey. 

It presses at windows, hugs cars,

seeks ill-cut doors, bathroom air vents.

You can never tell the time 

here, it’s either dark or grey, those are the only times of day.

What time is it in Jo’burg?

What time is it in Jo’burg?

Is it time for a calling to rise below the blood-streaked skies?

Is it time to be following the ants to their source,

and stopping up the hole?

Are you dusting off my photo

while you chip away at thickly sweet pap,

swallowing the lumps with your cup of tea?

What time is it in Jo’burg?

Is it time to be leaning out the car shouting into the tar?

Do lizards bake in the midday sun, 

alongside their beaded doppelgängers?

Is it time for you to go home?

Does the air thicken around your body

enfolding you, as I once did?

What time is it in Jo’burg?

Is the light turning without pity all across the city?

Bright within, dark without, 

shadows thrown carelessly across old scars and new.

And you, are you padding across the cooling ground

welcoming the shadows as lovers?

What time is it in Jo’burg?

Here. 

You can never tell the time 

here, with the grey. 

You can never tell the time 

here, it’s either dark or grey, those are the only times of day.

What time is it in Jo’burg?