UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Tuesday faced down rebels in his Conservative party by winning a knife-edge parliamentary vote on his latest plans to send migrants to Rwanda. In a tense vote, he saw off a Tory rebellion, winning the first substantive hearing of the so-called Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill by 313 votes to 269.
Sunak, in power for just over a year, has staked his political future on cutting record levels of regular and irregular migration and the issue is likely to feature prominently in the next election.
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill faces criticism both from Conservative centrists who think it skirts with breaking international law, and from lawmakers on the party’s authoritarian right, who say it doesn’t go far enough to ensure migrants who arrive in the UK illegally.
What is UK’s Safety of Rwanda bill?
The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill 2023 is the UK government’s latest attempt to deport asylum seekers to the east African country as part of efforts to cut immigration, after previous attempts were ruled illegal. It means those migrants who arrive illegally in Britain will be sent to Rwanda.
Under the plan, anyone who arrived in Britain illegally after January 1, 2022, faced being sent to Rwanda, around 6,400 km away. Sunak’s proposed law will overcome a ruling by the UK Supreme Court that termed the plan to send migrants to Rwanda as illegal.
The Rwanda plan is an expensive, highly controversial policy that hasn’t sent a single person to the East African country so far.
The plan has already cost the government at least $300 million in payments to Rwanda, which agreed in 2022 to process and settle hundreds of asylum-seekers a year from the UK Sunak believes that will deter migrants from making the hazardous journeys and break the business model of people-smuggling gangs.
More than 29,000 people have done so this year, down from 46,000 in all of 2022.
Why is Rwanda Policy So Important To Sunak?
After becoming prime minister in October 2022, Sunak made “stopping the boats” one of his top five priorities.
Britain is currently spending more than 3 billion pounds a year on processing asylum applications, with the cost of housing migrants awaiting a decision in hotels and other accommodation running at about 8 million pounds a day.
The bill is crucial for Sunak before the general elections as polls indicate the Conservatives are some 20 points behind the opposition Labour Party and one former senior minister said they faced “electoral oblivion” in an election expected next year unless he got the plan up and running.
Why is it controversial?
Human rights groups and legal experts say the bill proposes overriding any laws that will prevent a migrant from being deported, and compelling courts and tribunals to treat Rwanda as a “safe country”.
It also orders the courts to ignore other British laws or international rules, such as the International Refugee Convention, that prevent deportations to Rwanda.
Ministers would be allowed to ignore any emergency order from the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg to temporarily halt a flight to Rwanda while an individual case is still being considered.
Why are right-wingers unhappy?
Tory hardliners want the legislation to go even further by overriding the entire UK Human Rights Act, the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the UN refugee convention and all other international law.
They believe the bill would delay the deportation of migrants by allowing them to challenge their deportation to Rwanda on specific individual grounds if they can prove that it would leave them at real risk of serious harm. Migrants would then be able to appeal those claims, leading to further delays.
(With inputs from agencies)