“At our hotel, everyone says, ‘better to kill ourselves than to go to Rwanda’.” Quoted by The Guardian, the 21-year-old Syrian who makes these comments arrived in the United Kingdom by boat, like other asylum seekers from his country housed in the same Ibis, some 300 km from London. He has had a bullet in his thigh since Syrian government soldiers opened fire in his village in 2014.
The High Court in London is due to hold a hearing from Monday September 5 on the British government’s plan to deport some asylum seekers to Rwanda. In June, the first charter which was to transport migrants to this African country could not leave because of appeals lodged with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and before the British courts against this very policy. decried.
The left-wing daily The Independent revealed on September 3 documents showing that one of the asylum seekers taken to the plane had “Self-mutilé”, that another had “threatened to commit suicide” and that a third, extremely agitated, had to be subdued by a painful method. Of the “horrors” which led the team of Liberty Investigates journalists, who obtained these documents, to ask Liz Truss, probable future Prime Minister, to abandon the project. The latter, however, promised to “support and extend [cette] policy to more countries”.
Quoted by Guardian, a report by the medical association Medical Justice confirms these concerns by concluding that the threat of deportation to Rwanda increases the risk of suicide for asylum seekers. Their fear is all the greater, adds the newspaper, that London “has not made public the criteria according to which asylum seekers will or will not be affected by deportation, so that at the hotel everyone thinks they are threatened”.