In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court has unanimously upheld the Court of Appeal’s finding that the government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is unlawful.
Background of the Rwanda Policy
The government wants to introduce a controversial immigration policy that involves flying asylum seekers to Rwanda to have their claims assessed, rather than going through the process in Britain. The Rwandan authorities would then be responsible for determining whether the person was eligible for asylum, in which case they would be resettled there. The Rwanda policy was first introduced by Boris Johnson in April 2022 and has cost the government more than £140m to date.
According to the government, the idea behind this policy is to deter asylum seekers from making the dangerous crossing from France to the southern coast of England on small and often unsafe boats. Many opposition politicians and civil rights groups have, however, called this scheme inhumane, cruel and ineffective. The first planned Rwanda deportation flight was scheduled to take seven people seeking asylum in the UK to Rwanda in June 2022 but was blocked when the European Court of Human Rights ruled that people should not be sent there until the lawfulness of the policy had been examined by the UK and European courts.
Appeal Court Rules Rwanda is an Unsafe Country
In the first instance, a divisional court concluded that it was generally lawful for the government to make arrangements for relocating asylum seekers to Rwanda and for their asylum claims to be determined there rather than in the UK. It found that the policy was broadly consistent with the Refugee Convention and with the statutory and other legal obligations of the government, including the obligations imposed by the Human Rights Act 1998.
On appeal, however, the Court of Appeal found, by a majority, that the Rwanda policy was unlawful due to the fact Rwanda was not a sufficiently safe country. This was on the basis that the Rwandan authorities were not yet reliably able to sort genuine from non-genuine refugees, meaning that there was too great a risk that legitimate refugees would be sent back to their home countries where they might be persecuted. The Home Secretary appealed to the Supreme Court.
Supreme Court Upholds Finding that The Rwanda Policy is Unlawful
The Supreme Court has now unanimously held that the government’s policy to remove asylum seekers in the UK to Rwanda to have their asylum claims decided is unlawful and upheld the Court of Appeal’s decision.
In reaching this decision, the court considered the evidence, in particular, provided by the UNHCR (UN High Commission for Refugees) about Rwanda and found that the country has a poor human rights record, which the UK government itself had criticised only one year before the plan was announced. It also took into account evidence that Rwanda has serious and systematic defects in its asylum and treatment of asylum seekers, including a surprisingly high rate of rejections for individuals from conflict zones including 100% rejections for individuals from Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen.
Our Comments
The judgment appears to give the government some leeway to consider a renewed scheme with Rwanda, or other countries in the future - but only if the government has obtained the necessary guarantees that asylum seekers will be protected from ill-treatment. The UK government has made it very clear that it still wishes to pursue this policy and will be working on a new treaty so this is likely not to be the last word on this matter.
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