It took Rishi Sunak’s government four months to get its “Safety of Rwanda” bill passed, largely due to resistance from the Lords in the Westminster Parliament. The Lords finally gave in just after midnight on Tuesday, April 23, allowing Parliament to pass the highly contested bill. The bill declares Rwanda to be a safe country for asylum, enabling the long-delayed implementation of the asylum seeker subcontracting agreement signed between London and Kigali in April 2022.
Planes for Rwanda will be able to take off “within 10 to 12 weeks,” in July, promised Sunak at a Downing Street conference on Monday, ahead of the final parliamentary debates. Speaking from a lectern marked with the “stop the boats” slogan that Downing Street uses every time it addresses migration issues, the prime minister insisted that commercial flights and a departure airport have been arranged. Considered a priority, the Rwanda agreement is one of the Conservative leader’s last hopes of catching up with Labour, who are some 20 points ahead in the polls, a few months before the general election that is expected this fall.
The agreement signed with Rwanda is a first in Europe, and its implementation is being watched with interest across the continent. The aim is for London to deport people who have arrived illegally in the UK (without visas, by boat or hidden in lorries) to this East African country, whose economy is dynamic but whose regime is considered by many to be authoritarian. These people will only be able to claim asylum from Rwanda, which will examine their application. This effectively delegates the UK’s asylum responsibilities to Rwanda. Led by President Paul Kagame, Rwanda has already received around £500 million (€580 million) from London under the agreement.
Circumventing a Supreme Court decision
Introduced in the House of Commons in December 2023, the “Safety of Rwanda” bill circumvents a decision by the British Supreme Court, which ruled unanimously on November 15, 2023, that the Rwanda agreement was illegal because Rwanda was not a safe country. Asylum seekers there are at risk of expulsion to their country of origin. Deemed cruel by migrant rights associations and worrying for many legal experts who point to contradictions with the European Convention on Human Rights, the text prevents judges from questioning Rwanda’s safety in the event of an appeal by asylum seekers against their expulsion. It even allows British ministers to ignore provisional measures taken by the European Court of Human Rights to halt deportations.
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