Rwanda wants £100m in compensation for the axed Tory-era deal to hold asylum seekers kicked out of the UK. British PM Keir Starmer cancelled the plans when he took office. Now, Rwanda has taken their case to an international arbitration.
The deal was signed in 2022 by then-PM Boris Johnson. The Rwanda ‘off-shoring’ plan was the centrepiece of the Tories openly racist immigration policy.
The BBC reported:
Rwanda has filed an international arbitration case, arguing the UK has breached the terms of the deal to send some asylum seekers to the east African nation.
Under the deal, which was signed by the previous Conservative government, the UK agreed to make payments to Rwanda to host asylum seekers who had arrived illegally in Britain
And the Tories pushed for the plan knowing Rwanda is implicated in the mistreatment of refugees.
Rwanda: torture and abuse
The Rwandan state has a history of abuse and torture, according to Human Rights Watch. Moreover, the Global Detention Project (GDP) has gathered evidence of serious failings in Rwanda’s asylum practices.
Critics cited by GDP included the US State Department, which warned:
The government continued operating transit centers that advocacy groups and NGOs reported detained vulnerable persons and potential trafficking victims—including those in commercial sex, adults and children experiencing homelessness, members of the LGBTQI+ community, foreign nationals, and children in street vending and forced begging—and did not adequately screen for trafficking indicators among them.
The State Department added:
The government held many potential victims of trafficking in these centers, which functioned as de facto detention facilities, for up to six months.
The BBC said the previous UK government spent vast sums on the failed policy:
The previous Conservative government spent some £700m on the Rwanda policy, which was intended to deter migrants from crossing the English Channel in small boats.
In short, the Tories spent a large fortune on a scare tactic which then failed entirely – and now the UK is being sued for even more money.
Rwandan officials quoted by the BBC blamed British “intransigence”. A Home Office spokesperson said:
The previous government’s Rwanda policy wasted vast sums of taxpayer time and money.
We will robustly defend our position to protect British taxpayers.
The BBC reported:
The Rwandan government’s statement said it was making three claims in relation to the Migration and Economic Development Partnership, which was signed in 2022 when Boris Johnson was prime minister.
The statement accuses the UK of breaching the deal by setting out the financial terms of the agreement publicly, failing to make payments totalling £100m, and “refusing to make arrangements to resettle vulnerable refugees from Rwanda”.
Refusing to pay
As it stands Labour is going to resist paying up. But let’s be clear. None of this is to say Labour’s immigration policy is vastly better than the Conservative Party’s was. The theoretically left-leaning party has pitched further and further to the right as Reform UK have made gains in the polls.
The party has openly bragged about how many people it has ejected, even while cooking the figures. On 23 January, Labour was criticised for posting images of people being deported via its grotesque new ‘Secure Borders UK’ TikTok account.
Green Party politicians Carla Denyer said:
It will encourage the division and hatred already tearing our communities apart – turning people who were born here against those who simply want to make this country their home.
Sile Reynolds from the NGO Freedom from Torture warned:
This government is clearly hooked on the cheap political points it can score by turning the brutality of enforcement raids into clickbait online entertainment.
Adding:
This style of political communication provokes the kind of anxiety and fear that fuelled the summer riots and the recent violence directed at asylum hotels.
Built on a false narrative of invasion, the Tory plan to ‘offshore’ some of the most vulnerable people on earth were an abomination based in cold indifference and abject racism. Labour dropped the Rwanda plan, but in virtually every other aspect Keir Starmer has prosecuted an identical war on refugees and migrants. It should be self-evident at this point that UK immigration policy needs nothing less than a complete overhaul.
Featured image via the Canary
By Joe Glenton
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