The UK’s first flight to send asylum seekers who entered the country irregularly to Rwanda could be blocked just hours before take-off, after the European Court of Human Rights issued an injunction on Tuesday to prevent the deportation of a Iraqi immigrant.
The court ruled “that the applicant shall not be removed until the end of a period of three weeks after the delivery of the final decision of the ongoing judicial review process”. The Supreme Court in London is due to decide in July whether Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s policy is legal or not.
A British official who asked not to be named said the government was still evaluating the significance of the European court’s ruling, but admitted the flight might not go as planned.
In April, the UK prime minister announced one of the most controversial immigration policies of his term so far, under which the government will send migrants who enter the country irregularly to seek asylum in Rwanda, a country 7,000 kilometers away. , in the center of the African continent, and which has the 160th worst human development index in the world.
In recent days, at least 30 individuals who were supposed to board this flight have successfully argued against deportation on health or human rights grounds. Thus, only a few immigrants would be on the aircraft prepared to take off from an Air Force base in southwest England.
Boris’ policy horrified opposition, charities and religious leaders, who called the project inhumane. The official justification is to make life difficult for criminal organizations that practice human trafficking. In practice, however, the move is a nod to the Conservative Party electorate, which opposes immigration policies and which elected him to carry out the Brexit process in 2016.
The measure even has retroactive effect: anyone who has arrived in the UK illegally since January 1 can be sent to Rwanda, the prime minister said at the time of the announcement. To make the measure viable, the British Royal Navy will take over the operation with refugees in the English Channel, and the Executive will invest 50 million pounds (R$ 307 million) in personnel and equipment such as helicopters, planes and drones.
Rwanda, in turn, will receive an initial amount of 120 million pounds (R$ 738 million). The nation of 13 million people has, according to the United Nations immigration agency, “a policy open to refugees” and offers them regularization and work permits to integrate economically. Today, there are around 130,000 people in this situation, most of them from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi, many of whom have lived in the country for decades.
In practice, however, it is not simple to access these rights. The refugee camps, where 90% of this population live, have infrastructure problems, especially the older ones, in which families have grown over the years without any adaptation to accommodate them.
UNHCR, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, recognized this scenario when criticizing Boris’ program. “While Rwanda has generously provided a safe haven for those fleeing conflict and persecution for decades, most live in camps with limited access to economic opportunities,” said Gillian Triggs, assistant high commissioner for protection, for whom rich nations they should support the immigrants that Rwanda already harbors, not transfer others there “as if they were commodities”.
In addition to the UN, which also called the plan catastrophic, Church of England leadership denounced it as immoral, and reports from the British said that Prince Charles described the program as appalling.
Boris, on the other hand, criticized “leftist lawyers” who seek to block the initiative and said such attempts undermine support for safe routes for asylum seekers. “We will not be deterred by criticism, some of it from slightly unexpected quarters,” he told his ministers.
