Two days after Sunak fires Braverman, predicted in the Guardian, the Supreme Court has ruled the Rwanda Scheme to be illegal. See below for details.
Judgment has been handed down this morning in the ‘Rwanda Appeals.’ UKSC 2023/0093, UKSC 2023/0094, UKSC 2023/0095, UKSC 2023/0096, UKSC 2023/0097, UKSC 2023/0105: https://t.co/T35WcqVI16 pic.twitter.com/Xao8DquoeY
— UK Supreme Court (@UKSupremeCourt) November 15, 2023
Here are some links,
- The Supreme Court tweet, see above,
- The announcement on their web site, which has the judgement, a press summary and a link to Baillie i.e an HTML version of the judgement.
- My blog article, criticising the scheme and its mood music,
- I also have an article currently private, on Labour’s reaction to the scheme, and its historic lukewarm welcoming of Refugees.
- My blog note on the GMB adopting strong policy in opposition to the scheme, I wrote the motion.
I say, they say, sending asylum seekers to Rwanda is illegal because Rwanda’s legal system is insufficiently robust, and the risk of being sent to an unsafe third country or the country from which they had fled was significant and thus in breach of the ECHR and it is also in breach of the United Nations 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol (“the Refugee Convention”), Both these treaties are established by primary Parliamentary legislation, The press summary says,
Asylum seekers are protected against refoulement by the Human Rights Act 1998, section 6 of which makes it unlawful for the Home Secretary to remove asylum seekers to countries where there are substantial grounds to believe that they would be at real risk of refoulement contrary to article 3 ECHR. Further protection is provided by provisions in the Asylum and Immigration Appeals Act 1993, the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Act 2002 and the Asylum and Immigration (Treatment of Claimants etc) Act 2004, under which Parliament has given effect to the Refugee Convention as well as the ECHR
The Tory response seems to be to pass a law, saying that Rwanda is safe.
Featured Image: Mddx Guildhall, by Christine Smith via Wikipedia, CC 2009 BY-SA