UK court will rule on deportation flights for migrants to Rwanda

On Monday, judges at London’s High Court will decide if the British government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda is legal. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is betting his future on stopping a record number of small boats full of migrants from coming to Britain.

A contract reached in April calls for sending thousands of illegal immigrants who land on British soil more than 4,000 miles (6,400 km) to Rwanda.

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued a last-minute injunction that stopped the first scheduled deportation flight from taking off in June. A judicial review at London’s High Court then questioned the legality of this method.

At 10:30 GMT, judges Jonathan Swift and Clive Lewis are scheduled to announce their decision.

Even if the government wins on Monday, aircraft won’t be able to take off right away since there may be another appeal in the British courts and because the ECHR injunction put in place over the summer forbids any deportations from happening right away until the UK legal case is resolved.

One of Sunak’s first major policy announcements was a plan to stop illegal immigration. He also said he wanted to start flying to Rwanda again, even though MPs from all the major political parties, the UN, and even King Charles were against it.

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With statistics showing that more than 40,000 people, a record number, have entered the country through France this year, many of whom travelled from war-torn Afghanistan, Iran, or other nations to travel across Europe and then to Britain to seek asylum, the prime minister is coming under increasing pressure from his own members of parliament and the general public to deal with the arrivals.

Studies show that Americans now think that immigration is the third most important problem facing the country, after the economy and health.

On November 2, 2022, police stop people outside the Manston immigration short-term holding facility in Kent, England. They think these people are migrants.

This week, four migrants died in the Channel when their dinghy started to sink. This is the latest in a long line of tragedies at sea between Britain and France, and it shows that the government can’t stop people from crossing.

Inhumane and ineffective

In hearings this year, lawyers representing asylum seekers from nations like Syria, Sudan, and Iraq, as well as nonprofits and Border Force employees, testified before the High Court that the government’s Rwanda policy was harsh and did not adhere to human rights agreements.

They said that government officials were worried that Rwanda, whose own record on human rights is being looked into, doesn’t have the capacity to process the applications and that some migrants might be sent back to the countries they had fled.

According to Britain, the Rwanda deportation plan will prevent migrants from making the risky journey over the English Channel and will destroy the financial model of networks that traffic migrants.

Supporters of the Rwanda agreement say that moving migrants there will make processing centres less crowded and give a place to live to real refugees.

Tens of thousands of people have nevertheless continued to arrive in Britain ever since the policy was announced, and up until recently, Rwanda had only opened one hostel with a capacity for about 100 people to receive U.K. arrivals, which accounted for 0.35 percent of all migrants who arrived in Britain on small boats in 2017.

The plan is loosely based on Australia’s policy of processing migrants in Papua New Guinea and Nauru.

Except for unaccompanied children, anyone determined to have entered Britain illegally is subject to deportation under the terms of the agreement with Rwanda.

People who have been kicked out of the UK and are given protection by Rwanda’s government can live there, but they can’t go back to the UK.

Reuters