The British Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has acknowledged to members of the Conservative Party that her controversial Immigration Law has “more than a 50%” chance of being incompatible with the European Convention on Human Rights, according to The Guardian.
Braverman defended his plan, however, in statements to Sky News, in the face of criticism for his decision to deny the right of asylum to immigrants who cross the English Channel: “We are not breaking the law, and no member of our government has said that we are violating the laws”.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak also defended in Parliament the “legality” of the measure, despite the express condemnation of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which warned that the law would amount to “a ban on the right to asylum”. .
“This is the sixth immigration plan by the fifth successive prime minister,” the leader of the Labor opposition Keir Starmer warned in a harsh exchange with Rishi Sunak in the House of Commons. “And the reality is that none of those plans have worked and that the system is absolutely broken. To the point that less than 1% of the requests from the people who have arrived on the boats have been processed.”
Former footballer and BBC television commentator Gary Lineker added to the controversy by condemning the Immigration Act as “extremely cruel” and accusing Suella Braverman of “using language not dissimilar to that used in Germany in the 1930s”. Braverman herself defended on Sky News, alleging that the proposed measures are “fair and appropriate” and flatly rejecting the comparison with Nazi Germany.
“They are the ones who are breaking our laws and abusing the generosity of the British, and that’s why we need to make sure they can’t keep doing it,” he said, referring to the 45,756 migrants who completed the English Channel crossing in small boats in 2022.
Braverman warned that without drastic new measures, the number of crossings could nearly double to 80,000 this year. The Secretary of the Interior assured that immigrants pending asylum requests will no longer be housed in hotels: “We are setting up new detention centers and soon, very soon, we will extend our detention capacity to adjust them to the needs we have.”
Throughout the day, the Home Secretary was forced to dodge the fateful question: “Would the new law make it possible to deport immigrants like Olympic medalist Mo Farah, who came from Somalia “illegally” when he was nine years old?” The new measures, pending approval in Parliament, provide that only minors and people in situations of serious risk can avoid being arrested and deported if they arrive illegally on British shores.
The British government has also received harsh criticism for the inflammatory rhetoric used in the debate, starting with the slogan Stop the boats (Stop the boats!) written on the podium used by Rishi Sunak during his press conference on Tuesday. The claim echoes former Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s campaign a decade ago, when he faced a wave of migrants off Australia’s shores.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project
