Editorials

The Irish Times view on UK asylum policy: A brazen political stunt

British prime minister Boris Johnson. Photograph: Matt Dunham/PA Wire

Tue Apr 19 2022 - 05:30

England in 1868 ended the barbaric practice of transporting convicts and political prisoners, many of them Irish, to its American colonies and then Australia. Most had been convicted of minor offences – perhaps like the breaking of Covid partying regulations that would in the day have seen the likes of Boris Johnson on a ship to Sydney.

Now the Tory government wants to resume the practice with "illegal" asylum seekers – whose only crime is to seek asylum – in a deal in which Rwanda will be paid to resettle tens of thousands of the young people who have managed to cross the Channel in small boats at great personal risk, 28,000 of them in 2021.

Johnson declared the initiative an “innovative approach driven by our humanitarian impulse” and claimed that it was possible because Brexit cleared the way legally. “Innovative” if we forget the history of transportation, and scarcely “humanitarian”, while in reality the UK’s obligation to provide safe harbour to vulnerable asylum seekers stems not from the EU but the 1951 United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. The latter is likely to be invoked in legal cases against the Rwandan initiative which are certain to delay its implementation and may block it completely.

Opposition politicians point to Rwanda’s recent dubious human rights record which they argue hardly makes the country a “safe” refuge, and makes sending refugees there tantamount to “refoulement”, the return of refugees to the place they have fled from, and explicitly prohibited by the convention. The UN takes a dim view of member-states subcontracting out their obligations to refugees.

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Moreover, even if the scheme comes to fruition, the cost of compensating Rwanda, likely to run to billions of pounds if it takes tens of thousands of refugees, is unlikely to save the British taxpayer anything. It is also unlikely to deter people-smugglers to any degree.

It is difficult to see it as anything other than a blatant political stunt.

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