Explained: Why UK’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda has come under fire

The United Kingdom on Thursday signed a deal with Rwanda to send some asylum-seekers thousands of miles to the East African country, in a bid to “save countless lives” from human trafficking.

While the main target of the scheme will be single men arriving on boats or lorries, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that anyone entering the UK illegally may now be relocated to Rwanda.

However, the deal has not been received well by human rights activists and refugee organisations, who are seeing it as inhumane, unworkable and a waste of public money, and the United Nations said it raised “a number of human rights concerns.”

What is the controversial UK-Rwanda deal?

According to Indian Express, the UK government said that it may start sending asylum seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda within weeks.

The plan would see some people who arrive in Britain as stowaways on trucks or in small boats picked up by the UK government and flown 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers) to Rwanda, apparently for good.

“We must first ensure . . . that those who tried to jump the queue or abuse our system will find no automatic path to settlement in our country but rather be swiftly and humanely removed to a safe third country or their country of origin,” Johnson said.

As part of the pilot scheme, the UK has paid the Rwandan government GBP120 million for housing and integrating the migrants, which will initially last for five years, the Associated Press reported.

The agreement seeks to ensure “that people are protected, respected, and empowered to further their own ambitions and settle permanently in Rwanda if they choose,” Rwandan Foreign Affairs Minister Vincent Biruta said.

The UK Home Secretary, Priti Patel, said at a news conference in Rwanda’s capital city of Kigali that the people who are sent to the country “will be given the support including up to five years of training, integration, accommodation, health care, so that they can resettle and thrive.”
What is the aim of the scheme?

The UK government aims to improve the asylum system in the country. According to Patel, the UK has been struggling to deal with “a combination of real humanitarian crises and evil people smugglers profiteering by exploiting the system for their own gains.”

PM Johnson said that the scheme would break the business model of traffickers and disrupt the flow of illegal migration, while leaving “lots of capacity for the very generous safe and legal routes” into the UK.

While on the UK’s part it is essentially being done to bring down the number of people entering the country through illegal means, the Rwandan minister said the African country will not receive people from immediate neighbours like the DRC, Burundi, Uganda and Tanzania.

Migrants have long used northern France as a launching point to reach Britain, either by hiding on trucks or ferries, or — increasingly since the coronavirus pandemic shut down other routes in 2020 — in small boats organized by smugglers.

More than 28,000 people entered the UK in boats last year, up from 8,500 in 2020. Dozens have died, including 27 people in November when a single boat capsized.

Why is the deal controversial?

Rwanda is the most densely populated nation in Africa, and competition for land and resources there fueled decades of ethnic and political tensions that culminated in the 1994 genocide in which more than 800,000 ethnic Tutsis, and Hutus who tried to protect them, were killed.

Johnson insisted that Rwanda had “totally transformed” in the last two decades. But human rights groups have repeatedly criticized President Paul Kagame’s current government as repressive.

Lewis Mudge, Central Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said the claim Rwanda was a safe country “is not grounded in reality.”

“Arbitrary detention, ill-treatment, and torture in official and unofficial detention facilities is commonplace, and fair trial standards are flouted in many cases,” Mudge said.

A spokeswoman for the United Nations’ human rights office said that the UK was “shifting … its responsibilities and obligations under international human rights and refugee law onto a country which is already taking great asylum responsibilities.”

Previous policies of sending refugee applicants abroad have been highly controversial.

In 2013, Australia began sending asylum-seekers attempting to reach the country by boat to Papua New Guinea and the tiny atoll of Nauru, vowing that none would be allowed to settle in Australia. The policy all but ended the people-smuggling ocean route from Southeast Asia, but was widely criticized as a cruel abrogation of Australia’s international obligations.

Israel sent several thousand people to Rwanda and Uganda under a contentious and secretive “voluntary” scheme between 2014 and 2017. Few are believed to have remained there, with many trying to reach Europe.

Steve Valdez-Symonds, refugee director at Amnesty International U.K., said the British government’s “shockingly ill-conceived idea will go far further in inflicting suffering while wasting huge amounts of public money.”

Human Rights Watch also flagged “Rwanda’s appalling human rights record”.

“Rwanda has a known track record of extrajudicial killings, suspicious deaths in custody, unlawful or arbitrary detention, torture, and abusive prosecutions, particularly targeting critics and dissidents.

In fact, the UK directly raised its concerns about respect for human rights with Rwanda, and grants asylum to Rwandans who have fled the country, including four just last year,” it said in a statement

With inputs from agencies

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