The leader of the Labor opposition, Keir Starmer, has promised to end the plan to deport immigrants to Rwanda pending their asylum application. The announcement by Starmer, who this Tuesday will present his Government program for the 2024 elections at his party’s annual conference in Liverpool, comes at the same time as the Supreme Court debates whether the plan promoted by the Secretary of the Interior Suella Braverman is illegal.
“I think it is a wrong policy,” Starmer declared this Monday on the BBC, when asked about the future of the Rwanda Plan. “It is enormously expensive and only a minimal number of people would ultimately go to Rwanda, when the problem is at the source.”
“The Government has said time and again that this plan would reduce the number of immigrants, but that has not happened,” he added. “No one wants to see these crossings in the English Channel, but the only way to stop it is to crush the gangs who exploit the situation.”
Starmer warned that the anti-immigration rhetoric used by the Conservative Government “gets us nowhere” and said he was convinced that a Labor Government would be capable of achieving greater collaboration from France and other European Union countries to dismantle the gangs. of human trafficking.
The Labor leader also promised to give instructions to speed up the queue of pending asylum cases, currently estimated at more than 160,000. “People would be surprised to know that of all the people who have arrived by boat, only 1% of asylum applications have been processed.”
The Secretary of the Interior Suella Braverman has assured for her part that the so-called Illegal Immigration Law, which includes deportations to Rwanda, is taking effect and that crossings of the English Channel have decreased by 20% this year (after exceeding the 45,000 in 2022).
In his recent speech at the Conservative Party conference, Braverman warned that “the hurricane of mass immigration” is hovering over British shores and hinted that his country is willing to renounce international conventions that have become outdated.
The Rwanda Plan has meanwhile reached the Supreme Court, following the appeal presented by Rishi Sunak’s Government against the decision of an appeal court that considered it “illegal” for contravening the obligations of the United Kingdom as a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights. Humans.
For three days, the Supreme Court will hear the arguments of the Government and the NGOs that brought the plan to court. Although the ruling is not expected until mid-November, tension is maximum after Braverman’s recent threats, interpreted as a measure of pressure on the judges.
The Government will argue that Rwanda is a “safe” country and that there are sufficient legal guarantees so that migrants pending asylum are not returned to their countries of origin while their asylum application is pending.
The first flight with just half a dozen immigrants heading to Rwanda was stopped in extremis by the intervention of the European Court of Human Rights in July 2021, when Boris Johnson was prime minister. Rishi Sunak promised to move forward with the controversial plan, which has since been paralyzed by the legal dispute before the British courts.