UK plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda sparks outrage

LONDON (AP) — Britain’s Conservative government has struck a deal with Rwanda to send some asylum seekers thousands of miles to the East African country, a move opposition politicians and refugee groups they condemned as inhumane, impracticable and a waste of public money.

Interior Minister Priti Patel visited the Rwandan capital Kigali on Thursday to sign what the two countries called an “economic development partnership.” The plan will see some people arrive in Britain as stowaways in trucks or small boats across the English Channel, picked up by the UK government and flown 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) to Rwanda, seemingly forever.

Migrants have long used northern France as a starting point to reach Britain, either by hiding in trucks or ferries or, increasingly since the coronavirus pandemic closed other routes in 2020, by boats and other boats. small organized by smugglers. More than 28,000 people entered the UK in small boats last year, up from 8,500 in 2020. Dozens have died, including 27 people in November when a single boat capsized.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson said measures were needed to stop “vile human traffickers (who) are abusing the vulnerable and turning the Canal into a watery graveyard.”

In a speech near the Channel shore, Johnson said “anyone who enters the UK illegally… can now be relocated to Rwanda.”

The Rwandan government said the deal would initially run for five years and that Britain had paid 120 million pounds ($158 million) in advance to pay for housing and integration for the migrants.

Rwandan Foreign Minister Vincent Biruta said the deal “is about ensuring that people are protected, respected and empowered to further their own ambitions and settle permanently in Rwanda if they so choose.”

He said his country already hosts more than 130,000 refugees from countries including Burundi, Congo, Libya and Pakistan.

Johnson denied that the plan “lacked compassion” but acknowledged that it would inevitably face legal challenges and would not take effect immediately.

Rwanda is Africa’s most densely populated nation, and competition over land and resources fueled decades of ethnic and political tensions that culminated in the 1994 genocide that killed more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and the Hutus who tried to protect them. Human rights groups have repeatedly criticized the current government of President Paul Kagame for being repressive.

Johnson, however, insisted that Rwanda had been “totally transformed” in the past two decades.

Britain says relocation decisions will not be based on the migrants’ country of origin, but on whether they used “illegal or dangerous routes” to reach the UK from a safe country like France. Not all such arrivals will be considered suitable for shipment to Rwanda; it was not clear what the criteria would be for making the decisions.

Past policies for sending refugee claimants abroad have been highly controversial.

In 2013, Australia began sending asylum seekers trying to reach the country by boat to Papua New Guinea and the small atoll of Nauru, promising that none would be allowed to settle in Australia. The policy nearly ended the oceanic human smuggling route from Southeast Asia, but was widely criticized as a cruel derogation from Australia’s international obligations.

Israel sent several thousand people to Rwanda and Uganda under a controversial and secret “voluntary” scheme between 2014 and 2017. Few are believed to have stayed there, with many trying to reach Europe.

Steve Valdez-Symonds, refugee director at Amnesty International UK, said the British government’s “shockingly ill-conceived idea will go far beyond inflicting suffering while wasting huge amounts of public money”.

UK-based Refugee Council chief executive Enver Solomon called it “dangerous, cruel and inhumane”.

Rwandan opposition figure Victoire Ingabire told the AP that her government’s decision to take in migrants was questionable, given that the country is also a source of refugees.

“Rwanda has been consistently ranked (as) one of the safest nations in the world, but at the same time consistently a country where its people are unhappy,” he said.

The British and French governments have worked for years to stop cross-Channel travel, without much success, often trading accusations about who is to blame for the failure.

Britain’s Conservative government has put forward proposals, not all of which are feasible, including building a wave machine in the Channel to push ships back. Johnson said Thursday that the Royal Navy would be tasked with responding to small boat crossings, but the idea of ​​turning boats back toward France had been rejected as too dangerous.

Several previously proposed places for the UK to send migrants, including remote Ascension Island, Albania and Gibraltar, were rejected, sometimes angrily, by the nations in question.

The Rwanda plan faces obstacles both in the British Parliament and in the courts. Johnson’s Conservative government has introduced a tough new immigration bill that would make it harder for people entering the country via unauthorized routes to apply for asylum and allow asylum seekers to be vetted abroad. It has not yet been approved by Parliament, and the House of Lords is seeking to water down some of its more draconian provisions.

Opposition politicians accused the government of trying to distract attention from a scandal over government parties that violated pandemic lockdown rules. Johnson is resisting calls to resign after being ticketed by police for partying.

Labor Party lawmaker Lucy Powell said the Rwanda plan might please some Conservative supporters and grab headlines, but was “unworkable, costly and unethical”.

“I think it’s less about dealing with small boats and more about dealing with the sinking ship of the prime minister himself,” Powell told the BBC.

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Ignatius Ssuuna in Kigali, Rwanda and Andy Meldrum in Johannesburg, South Africa contributed to this story.

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Follow AP coverage of migration issues at https://apnews.com/hub/migration

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