The Judges have delivered one of hell of a blow to the Conservatives’ Rwanda deportation plan

I don’t see how even politicians as devious as our rulers get out of this

The judges of the UK Supreme Court

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The cruelty was not a regrettable side effect of the UK government’s asylum policy; the cruelty was the point.  The Conservatives pretended to be planning to deport all people who arrived in the UK without authorisation to Rwanda, regardless of whether they were legitimate refugees or not, because they wanted to scare them. (I say “pretended” because, in truth, the UK would only have managed to deport a few hundred asylum seekers annually.)

The Supreme Court today banned any deportations. The judges found against the government on the grounds that Rwanda would only qualify as a safe country if the principle of “non-refoulement” were respected there. In other words, deportations would only be legal if ministers were not sending refugees from one oppressive country to another.

As the judges explained it, asylum seekers must not be sent “directly or indirectly, to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened on account of their race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, or they would be at real risk of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment.”

And asylum seekers’ freedoms would have been endangered in Rwanda. Of course, they would. The threat to send asylum seekers to Rwanda was meant to deter them from ever seeking asylum in the UK in the first place. If Rwanda were a caring, welcoming liberal democracy, there would have been no deterrent effect.

The Supreme Court judges explained that in 2021 “the UK government criticised Rwanda for ‘extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and torture’.”

Ministers could hardly pretend that they did not know how badly human rights were abused by the effective president-for-life  Paul Kagame  and his thuggish minions. Their own officials had spelt it out in admirably plain English.

The government’s plan to dump asylum seekers in central Africa and order them to seek refugee status in Rwanda also contained the implied promise that Rwanda had a fair asylum system.

The court ruled that the promise was bogus. The judges said the United Nations had reported on

“(i) concerns about the asylum process itself, such as the lack of legal representation, the risk that judges and lawyers will not act independently of the government in politically sensitive cases, and a completely untested right of appeal to the High Court,

(ii) the surprisingly high rate of rejection of asylum claims from certain countries in known conflict zones from which asylum seekers removed from the UK may well emanate,

(iii) Rwanda’s practice of refoulement, which has continued since the [British and Rwandan governments] Migration and Economic Development Partnership was concluded,

and (iv) the apparent inadequacy of the Rwandan government’s understanding of the requirements of the Refugee Convention.”

Which I would say covers all the available ground.

After the Trump victory and Brexit I resolved never to underestimate right-wing populism again. But when all the caveats have been made, it still looks to me as if the courts have stymied the government.

First and most important, it is British judges in the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court, not foreigners sitting in the European Court of Human Rights, who have found against ministers. It is far harder for the Tories to rerun a “take back control” campaign against our own judges than against a continental court. It’s not just that the British public trusts its judges more than its politicians, research carried out by YouGov for the Constitution Unit at University College London found widespread public support to giving judges a role in in ensuring that elected politicians operate within the rules.

To make matters worse for the Conservatives, the Supreme Court cited domestic law, international law and European Convention of Human Rights, which is incorporated into UK law via the Human Rights Act.

Now, the Conservatives could in theory repeal the domestic law and take the UK out of the human rights convention.  But the European convention is written into the Northern Ireland peace agreement. Withdrawal would spark a diplomatic crisis with Ireland, the European Union, and crucially, the United States, where support for maintaining the status quo in Ireland is found in all parties in Congress.

I am not saying that the right does not want a confrontation, just that the chances of it succeeding have got slimmer.  If the government presses ahead, even the most bovine of journalists will start, eventually, to ask the hard questions. How many asylum seekers are you planning to deport to Rwanda? (Answer: hardly any.) Won’t the US threaten severe punishments if we threaten the Northen Ireland peace agreement?  (Answer: You’d better believe it.)

Meanwhile, Labour’s plan of reaching an agreement with the EU, under which we take an annual quota of refugees in return for the EU taking back men and women who arrive illegally, looks more sensible by the minute.

My best guess is that there will be months of right-wing blustering about the Supreme Court ruling and then the policy will be quietly dropped after the next election.

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