Rwanda asylum seekers scheme: UK must ignore hypocritical United Nations and press on with Rishi Sunak's plan to stop the boats – Dr Azeem Ibrahim

The Age of Migration could see hundreds of millions of people on the move over the next 50 years due to demographic shifts and climate change

The United Nations’ Human Rights Committee earlier this month urged Britain to abandon the Rwanda plan in its entirety. Its review of the UK position expressed its “regret” that the government had struck the Migration and Economic Development Partnership with Rwanda, and that we have persisted with it despite it being blocked in our Supreme Court. While it is gratifying that those sitting on such supranational organisations are at last paying lip service to our independent judiciary, they really do make no effort to hide their double standards.

From 2019, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has itself sent more than 2,000 refugees to Rwanda from countries including Libya. They know, and we know, that Rwanda more than reaches the reasonable standards of safety required under the UN Refugee Convention. Indeed, even the Supreme Court was unable to establish that Rwanda was itself unsafe. Instead, it argued that there was a risk that refugees may end up back in their home countries – a risk of “refoulement”.

I myself have been to Rwanda and have seen the accommodations and operations that are in place should the scheme ever begin in earnest. As someone who has been researching genocides, atrocities, and persecution for over a decade, I have seen my fair share of refugee accommodation all over the globe. Those that Kigali have prepared – largely with British money, of course – meet the gold standard, while their attitude and professionalism is impressive.

Necessarily expensive

As the gap between the physical reality of safety and the pretensions of court judges grows wider and wider, something eventually has to give. Many believe that leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) is the only way to reset human rights law and ensure that fundamental liberties can be protected in a way that doesn’t open massive immigration loopholes. Certainly, reform of the UN Refugee Convention is massively overdue, and international leadership will have to emerge sooner or later.

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Rwanda is certainly expensive. It has to be if it is to be functional and compliant within the modern hypermobile world which lacks fit-for-purpose refugee law. It’s designed to meet our international obligations in a way that doesn’t overburden us with refugees and discourages dangerous Channel crossings. It’s also true that the larger goal will be this reform for which Britain is positioned to lead internationally. But we must press on with Rwanda in the meantime. The scheme may even have a role in shaping the future of refugee law.

A manager shows a room at the Hallmark Residence for asylum seekers sent from the UK in a suburb of Kigali, Rwanda, in 2022 (Picture: Simon Wohlfahrt/AFP via Getty Images)

No more pyjama injunctions

The start of operations to Rwanda is closer than you think. Government ministers are quietly confident that they will succeed. The guidance which allowed the ECHR judges to block flights back in June 2022 has been altered to have a stronger language to justify blocking deportations. There must now be an “imminent risk of irreparable harm”, which, the facts show, is not the case for refugees being moved to Rwanda. With the Illegal Migration Act 2023, government ministers can ignore ECHR ‘pyjama’ injunctions against deportations – so called because one imagines the judge blocking them last-minute in the middle of the night. A breakthrough on this in within reach.

The Rwandan initiative proposed by the government stands as the sole effective measure to curtail mass movements of people amidst the onset of the Age of Migration. This era forecasts the movement of hundreds of millions of individuals over the next 50 years due to demographic shifts and climate change. All alternative approaches merely scratch the surface of this issue. The Rwandan plan stands as the singular viable solution. No other political faction in the UK presents anything resembling a pragmatic strategy to stem the influx of migrant boats.

Should Starmer, for instance, assume leadership, the painstaking legal and political groundwork laid for the Rwandan plan would be obliterated instantly. Research conducted by the Henry Jackson Society indicates that terminating the Rwandan initiative and engaging in return agreements with the EU in exchange for refugee quotas, as Starmer intends, would result in an annual influx of over 120,000 additional migrants, perpetuating the small boats crisis indefinitely. Considering the current state of polling, it is imperative to reiterate that Rwanda offers a compassionate and sustainable resolution, quite possibly the only one available.

Dr Azeem Ibrahim OBE is author of Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Hidden Genocide and the recipient of the 2019 International Association of Genocide Scholars Award