British Prime Minister Boris Johnson delivers a speech at Lydd Airport, England, on April 14. Britain says it has struck a deal with Rwanda to send some asylum seekers to the central African country, a proposal that has been condemned by opposition politicians and refugee groups.Matt Dunham/The Associated Press
Under a new British government plan, thousands of asylum seekers who cross the English Channel on small and often rickety boats will be detained and flown more than 6,500 kilometres on one-way tickets to Rwanda.
Migrants who arrive in Britain without authorization – including some who arrived as early as Jan. 1 this year – will no longer be allowed to remain in the country while they await the outcomes of their cases. Under the plan announced on Thursday, they will instead be sent to the African country, where their claims will be processed. Some could then be resettled there.
Critics, including refugee experts and human-rights groups, say the scheme will inflict new suffering on the asylum seekers and expose them to further abuse in an authoritarian country whose security forces have killed refugees in the past.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in a speech that the plan “will become a new international standard in addressing the challenges of global migration and people smuggling.” He described Rwanda as a “dynamic” country, one of the safest and fastest-growing economies in the world, with the capacity to resettle tens of thousands of people in the years ahead.
More than 28,000 people crossed the English Channel in small boats to reach Britain last year – more than triple the number in the previous year. About 600 people made the crossing on Thursday alone and the number could soon reach 1,000 a day, Mr. Johnson said.
Rwandan Foreign Affairs Minister Vincent Biruta said in a statement that his government is creating “a safe and empowering haven” for anyone seeking refuge. He said the British plan will bring with it about $200-million in British investment in education and training for Rwandans and migrants.
But refugee groups, human-rights advocates and United Nations officials swiftly denounced the scheme. They called it a violation of international laws and a serious threat to the international system of refugee protection that has saved millions of lives in the past.
People fleeing war and persecution “should not be traded like commodities and transferred abroad for processing,” Gillian Triggs, assistant high commissioner at UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, said in a statement.
She said the refugee agency is strongly opposed to the British plan. “Such arrangements simply shift asylum responsibilities, evade international obligations and are contrary to the letter and spirit of the Refugee Convention,” she said.
Instead of deterring refugees from perilous journeys across the English Channel, the new approach will only “magnify risks” by forcing refugees to seek alternative routes, she said.
Human Rights Watch said in a statement that the British plan is “cruelty itself” and will prove to be ineffective and unlawful. Australia’s similar system of offshore processing for asylum seekers has caused severe abuses and “immense human suffering” over the past eight years, with many people trapped in indefinite detentions that have led to suicides and an epidemic of self-harm, the group said.
Many experts ridiculed Mr. Johnson’s portrait of Rwanda as a safe country with an endless capacity for accepting refugees. In reality, they said, Rwanda is one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in the world, heavily dependent on foreign aid, with a long history of persecuting dissidents.
Human Rights Watch said Rwanda has a well-documented record of appalling human-rights violations, including extrajudicial killings, suspicious deaths in custody, torture, unlawful detention and abusive prosecutions, often targeting dissidents.
In 2018, the organization noted, Rwandan security forces killed at least 12 refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who were protesting a cut in food rations. They then arrested a further 60 of the refugees and prosecuted them for “spreading false information.”
In addition, Rwandan authorities have shown their low opinion of refugee laws by kidnapping Rwandan refugees abroad and bringing them home to face trial and ill-treatment, Human Rights Watch said. It added that there are credible allegations that Rwandan agents have assassinated Rwandan refugees outside the country.
In one of the most notorious cases, the exiled dissident Paul Rusesabagina – hero of the Hotel Rwanda movie – was lured onto an airplane in Dubai and flown against his will to Rwanda, where he was placed on trial and sentenced to 25 years in prison.
The British government itself has expressed alarm at Rwanda’s record of abuses. Last year it told the UN Human Rights Council that it was concerned about “continued restrictions to civil and political rights and media freedom” in Rwanda. It called for independent investigations of allegations of extrajudicial killings, deaths in custody, enforced disappearances and torture.
Human trafficking is another long-standing concern in Rwanda. A report last year by the U.S. State Department said Rwanda did not meet the minimum standards for the elimination of trafficking. “The government detained thousands of potential victims in district transit centres without conducting adequate screening,” it said.
Recent history suggests asylum seekers who are sent to Rwanda can suffer ill-treatment. Under an agreement between the Israeli and Rwandan governments in 2013, thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers were sent from Israel to Rwanda. Scholars who later interviewed some of the asylum seekers found that the Rwandan authorities had confiscated their travel documents as soon as they landed, transferred the refugees to a guarded hotel, prevented them from leaving and refused to allow them to apply for asylum. Because they lacked identity documents, they were exposed to robberies and arrests, and many fled Rwanda on dangerous journeys to seek better homes.
Steve Valdez-Symonds, refugee and migrant rights director for the British branch of Amnesty International, said the British government scheme is “shockingly ill-conceived” and will inflict suffering on asylum seekers while wasting huge amounts of public money.
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Geoffrey York