Britain’s Home Secretary has said boat migrants who may be removed from Britain and resettled in Rwanda should think of the arrangements as a “blessing”, infuriating anti-borders activists and politicians.
Suella Braverman, the Conservative (Tory) MP who runs the British government department with broad responsibility for border control, policing, and national security, touted the benefits of the long-implemented UK-Rwanda Migration and Economic Development Partnership after a visit to the African country, which has agreed to host migrants on Britain’s behalf as a third safe country.
“I would call it a blessing, I think, as we’ve seen, I’ve met refugees from several countries here, who are enormously grateful for the sanctuary that Rwanda has provided, education opportunities, security, a home, opportunity in the future. Coming to Rwanda, being resettled to Rwanda, will provide these vulnerable people with a prosperous future,” Braverman said in comments quoted by The Times.
“I encourage all of my critics to actually visit Rwanda before they cast aspersions and throw around incredibly prejudiced and snobbish opinions about what this beautiful country has to offer.”
The number of migrants landing in Britain in small boats to claim asylum — despite setting sail from European Union member-states that are perfectly safe, chiefly France — has been increasing exponentially every year since 2018, with no meaningful action to stop it due to successive Tory prime ministers’ unwillingness to simply turn the boats around.
It is believed that resettling migrants who reach Britain in safe but less economically desirable countries — so far Rwanda is the only country an agreement has been struck with — will deter people not in genuine need of asylum from coming to Britain, but the policy is not without its detractors, with public figures who clearly wish there should be no real controls on who can migrate to Britain, such as millionaire pundit Gary Lineker and the Archbishop of Canterbury, decrying the Rwanda scheme as somehow inhumane.
The Rwanda transfer scheme has been on hold up to now because the European Court of Human Rights — which the UK is still subject to as it is technically not an EU body, although the EU insists prospective members must submit to it and has pushed hard to make Britain’s continued submission to it a part of the Brexit treaties — blocked removal flights, but Braverman believes there is a chance a workaround may be in the offing.
“The government has been clear that the opaque Strasbourg process which led to the last-minute grounding of our Rwanda flight with a Rule 39 order last year was deeply flawed,” Braverman said in comments quoted by Sky News, referring to the bizarre process in which an anonymous ECtHR judge overruled British judges and blocked what would have been the first removal flight to Rwanda in 2022.
“That’s why we have measures in our bill that will address how the UK intends to comply with such orders in the future,” Braverman claimed — although Prime Minister Sunak has signalled strongly that his government has no real appetite for breaking with the European court.
Braverman added that she had “been encouraged by the government’s constructive recent discussions” with the ECHR, however — “including around possible reforms to Rule 39 procedures, which is obviously something we’d like to see.”
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