Days before the first plane was scheduled to leave for Rwanda, its reluctant passengers stopped eating. Several inmates of the Colnbrook immigration detention center, attached to London’s Heathrow airport, declared themselves in hunger strike to protest against the intentions of the British Government to deport asylum seekers to the African country arrived in the United Kingdom irregularly. “I see no reason why I should be transferred to a country in Africa where I have no relatives or family,” a 20-year-old Syrian who fled his country after refusing to enlist in Bashar al-Assad’s army told Al Jazeera. , the ‘butcher’ of Damascus. “I will refuse to go, but if the British government insists on my deportation to Kigali and force me to get on the plane, I will take my own life”, he warned desperately after being included in the ticket of the first plane.
That flight never took off. The European Court of Human Rights – a body attached to the Council of Europe, to which the United Kingdom still belongs – avoided it at the last minute with a precautionary measure that served to temporarily ground the seven asylum seekers included in the passage . Most originating from the Middle East and Africa. “It is not a final decision. The court did not say that the model is illegal or that cannot be sent to a third country. What he said is that, in the specific case of one of them, he cannot be transferred until his appeal has exhausted the path of the British Justice”, Nikolas Tan, an expert in immigration law at the Danish Institute for Human Rights, assures this newspaper. .
London has not given its arm to twist. In April he signed a agreement with Rwanda to outsource part of its border management, an upward trend among rich countries. Specifically, the processing of asylum applications for those who arrived on the islands with the intention of obtaining refugee status. In exchange for an initial payment of 120 million pounds, Kigali will be in charge of receiving the deportees, processing their applications and giving them shelter if their protection as refugees is approved. The agreement, valid for the next five years, does not specify how many could be forcibly transferred to Rwanda, though Boris Johnson has said it could be “tens of thousands of people in the next few years.”
colonialist echoes
Unsurprisingly, the controversial plan has sparked a wave of criticism inside and outside from United Kingdom. So much for the Doubts about its legality as for the ethical issues that proposes the transfer of people fleeing persecution and war to a country located 6,500 kilometers away, with few democratic guarantees and frequent violations of human rights. While Downing Street’s stated intention is to deter irregular migration, the plan reminds the old colonial practices. “There is a huge imbalance of power here. Basically, rich countries are outsourcing their obligations to countries in the global south,” says Professor of Humanitarian Law at the University of London (SOAS), Lutz Oette. “This is part of a long history of colonialism, economic inequalities and power imbalances. Rich countries should not be allowed to part with their obligations at the stroke of a checkbook.
But that is what they are doing more and more. Whether it is by exporting toxic waste or garbage to Asia or Africa to be “recycled” there or by sending migrants and asylum seekers to third parties países. The ultimate goal is the same, but the formulas vary. USA It was the first in extraterritorializing its services by interning thousands of Haitians and Cubans at the Guantánamo military base (Cuba) in the 1990s. Australia followed with the deportation and detention in Nauru and Papua New Guinea of illegal migrants and asylum seekers arriving on its shores. Later came the agreement of the European Union with Turkey for Ankara to take in immigrants who have arrived irregularly on the Greek islands or for Italy to detain those who try to reach its shores through the Mediterranean. Israel has also experimented with the formula by sending African refugees to Uganda and Rwanda.
Questioned legality
Many of these programs have given rise to all kinds of rights violations and abuses enshrined in the Convention on the Status of Refugees of the UN (1951) or the European Convention on Human Rights (1953), but so far they have not served to curb outsourcing policies. “These countries play with the gray areas of the law. Asylum is a right, but international law does not give the right to choose in which country it is requested”, says Professor Tan. And although the United Kingdom has promised to carry out a first evaluation in its territory of each individual to determine who can be sent to Rwanda, the risks abound, according to experts.
The legislation prevents discrimination for reasons of race, religion or country of origin, but what is certain, according to Professor Oette, is that “British policies tend to penalize those who arrive in the country by sea as opposed to other methods, which particularly affects those nationalities with more difficulties to obtain visas, such as Afghanistan, Iran, Vietnam and several African countries”. Another tricky issue is the principle that prohibits sending refugees to countries where they may be victims of abuse or torture. And although London maintains that Rwanda is a safe country that currently hosts more than 120,000 refugees of various origins, human rights organizations have many doubts about this.
“The British plan is the subject of heated debate, but probably illegal under international law. That is the consensus among experts,” says Professor Oette of the University of London. Their development is being closely watched in Denmark, which last year passed a similar law to outsource asylum. It only needs to close a bilateral agreement with a third country so that the expulsions can begin.