The House of Commons of the British Parliament on Wednesday evening passed the government’s controversial bill to forcibly relocate asylum seekers to Rwanda, East Africa, while their claims are assessed in the United Kingdom. 320 parliamentarians voted in favour, 276 against. The vote was very important for the government: the one on Rwanda is one of the main legislative proposals promoted by Rishi Sunak since he became prime minister in 2022 but the law is considered by many to be unworkable and had already been postponed several times.
Furthermore, Sunak’s own party, the Conservative Party, was divided on the issue because some of its members believed that the bill was too moderate. In recent days it seemed that around forty Conservative MPs might vote against for this reason: in the end only 11 voted against. An MP from the most radical faction of the party he said to BBC News that the vote on the bill was considered a vote of confidence by the parliamentarians and that the internal opposition chose to vote in favor so as not to put the government in excessive difficulty.
If the proposal had not passed it would have been a problem for Sunak, whose support is declining, also because the last time a British government bill was rejected in its final stage was in 1977.
The plan involving Rwanda has long been at the center of the immigration management policies of Conservative Party governments, but has so far never been implemented due to various rulings by British courts and the European Court of Human Rights. ‘man.
A first version of the law was presented as early as April 2022, but was ruled illegal by the British Supreme Court in November 2023. The Court assessed that Rwanda was not a “safe country”, an expression of international law which can be interpreted differently by each individual country, but also that asylum seekers transferred there would have risked being repatriated to their countries of origin, where they could have suffered inhumane treatment. Both would be violations of the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedomsthe most important European treaty for the recognition of human, civil and political rights which prohibits torture and inhuman treatment, of which the United Kingdom is a signatory.
It is no coincidence that already in June 2022 the European Court of Human Rights (which is not a body linked to the European Union, of which the United Kingdom is no longer part, and is responsible for applying the Convention) had blocked with a ‘temporary injunction what was supposed to be the first flight to transfer asylum seekers to Rwanda an hour and a half before departure. No further flights have been scheduled since then.
To block these flights the European Court had issued an extraordinary measure on the basis of Article 39 of the Convention, which allows provisional and binding measures to be taken immediately when the Court deems that there is a real risk of “serious and irreversible harm” for an individual: in this case it was transfer ( which however is in fact an expulsion) of some asylum seekers in Rwanda.
The bill approved by the House of Commons was presented by the Conservative Party in response to the British Supreme Court ruling. It defines Rwanda as a “safe country” and better outlines the legal framework for transfers. The most radical faction of the Conservative Party had presented an amendment to give British judges and public officials the possibility of ignoring the orders of the European Court of Human Rights, but it was not approved: only 65 MPs voted in favour, including 61 members of the Conservative Party – among them former Prime Minister Liz Truss and former Home Secretary Suella Braverman.
The rulings of the European Court are actually not as binding as those of a national court and could be ignored, but passing a law that gives the possibility to systematically circumvent its extraordinary measures would represent a very serious violation of international politics.
Now the bill must also be approved by the House of Lords.
Regardless of the steps taken by the British government to transfer asylum seekers to Rwanda, the plan to do so has always been highly criticized also because it is considered wasteful and ineffective. According to its supporters, it would become a deterrent for those who enter the country illegally by crossing the English Channel from France on small boats. In fact, most experts have decreed that there is no evidence that it will work. Plus it’s very expensive: the British government has already paid the government Rwandans the equivalent of 160 million euros and the plan should to cost almost 200 thousand euros per migrant, much more than they would spend without transferring them.