LEICESTER, UK – Britain’s chief Catholic refugee agency says the UK’s continued plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is “profoundly troubling”.
This week, the British parliament is debating a Bill declaring that Rwanda is a safe country for asylum seekers. This would reverse the November 2023 ruling by the UK Supreme Court, which said genuine refugees sent to Rwanda would be at risk of being returned to their home countries, where they could face harm.
“This Bill – the ‘Safety of Rwanda (asylum and immigration) Bill’ is an attempt to ram through the cruel and unworkable plan to forcibly transfer people seeking sanctuary here to Rwanda, in the face of the Supreme Court’s Judgement that that there is too great a risk that asylum claims would not be fairly considered in Rwanda,” the Jesuit Refugee Service UK (JRS UK) said in a statement.
“This is a profoundly troubling moment for British politics. In the Rwanda plan, the government conceived of a horrifying and inhuman scheme, the piece de resistance in a matrix of highly impractical policies, the core purpose of which is performative cruelty towards people who have lost everything and seek only to rebuild their lives in safety.”
The new Bill passed its first vote in Parliament in December 2023, but its fate is still not certain. Some Conservative politicians think the bill should go further, while others are concerned that it breaks international law.
JRS UK argues that the government, confronted with the court’s finding – “that Rwanda is not safe for refugees” – is trying to craft a legal fiction:
“The disregard for evidence – indeed, for sheer reality – in the making of policy could hardly be starker. This Bill plays fast and loose with both domestic and international law. All of this is awful,” the Catholic group said.
“What remains most horrifying is that our political culture has reached a point where the forced transfer of people seeking sanctuary here is being considered at all, let alone pursued so theatrically at so high a cost to our democratic institutions,” it continued.
The UK government signed a new migration treaty with Rwanda after the Supreme Court ruling, which Home Secretary James Cleverley said guarantees that any people sent to Rwanda to claim asylum would not be at risk of being returned to their home countries.
JRS UK, however, says the British government plan “utterly disregards” the value of human dignity and human life and will forcibly transfer women, men, children seeking safety in the UK to Rwanda:
“It denies the common ties that bind human beings and give us a duty of care towards each other. It abrogates any sense that our society has a duty to take a share in the global responsibility of providing sanctuary to refugees. And, concretely, were it ever enacted, it would destroy lives and plunge refugees into fresh danger. It should be unthinkable,” the Catholic agency says.
“There is a risk that ideas like this become normalised, as the opposition begins to talk about outsourcing asylum processing as an ‘alternative’ to the Rwanda plan. If we let it, this could become the mainstream of our political discourse.
“We must not let this happen. This cannot be the new normal. This is not the society we want to be,” the JRS UK says.
The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) is also questioning the UK-Rwanda agreement.
It says the plan runs counter to the fundamental principles of global solidarity and responsibility-sharing that underpin the international refugee protection system. This is due, UNHCR says, to shifting responsibility for identifying and meeting international protection needs from the UK to Rwanda, making the plan “an example of ‘externalisation’ of international protection”.
It continues: “By entrenching responsibility-shifting, the treaty remains at variance with the spirit and letter of the Refugee Convention. UNHCR notes that past externalisation attempts and arrangements have not represented sustainable, effective responses to refugee movements.
“Refugees are already disproportionately hosted in the developing world, in countries that continue to welcome and protect refugees despite very pressing challenges. Low and middle-income countries, including in Africa, host 75 per cent of the world’s refugees. The definitive transfer of asylum-seekers from the UK to Rwanda will increase, rather than address, this imbalance.”
The deal also undermines the wider global protection regime, the UNHCR says, “sending a damaging signal to large refugee hosting countries that the solidarity of international partners can no longer be relied on.”
Photo: Rwanda map with regions and cities of the country. (Photo credit Nataliia Nikolenko; iSotck by Getty Images.)
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.