On the day the European Court of Human Rights stopped, on June 14, 2022, the first flight from London to Kigali, the capital of Rwanda, there were six migrants inside a 220-passenger apparatus. The Conservative British government, headed by Boris Johnson at the time, was determined until the last minute to show its voters and the rest of the world that it was serious about its commitment to ending irregular immigration. One year later, the new Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, finally managed to approve a draconian illegal immigration law with questionable legal framework. He did just that while arriving at the Isle of Portland, on the south coast of England, in the Baby Stockholm, a gigantic ship on which Downing Street wants to accommodate newcomers to the country after crossing the dangerous waters of the English Channel. There are hardly 500 people. The government said the first 50 would begin to be housed in this “floating prison” in the coming weeks, according to important humanitarian organisations. Across the UK, some 160,000 people are waiting while the authorities process their asylum application. Last year, more than 46,000 people arrived on flimsy boats on the country’s southern coast.
Sunak and his home secretary, Soila Braverman, insisted on making firm gestures to pacify the hard-line wing of their party, knowing, however, that they could not open the gates into the sea.
Ministers use vulnerable and traumatized people for political purposes. “They are feeding the public a campaign of misinformation about issues around the right of asylum, causing division and resentment,” said Sasha Deshmukh, executive director of Amnesty International’s UK division. “The use of former military barracks and other inadequate accommodation facilities must be completely terminated, as well as this horrible law or agreement with Rwanda. [para deportar inmigrantes]Deshmukh demands.
The immigration crisis facing the British government is a perfect storm…in a glass of water. It is true that the numbers of people crossing the Channel from French shores to the UK have grown exponentially in recent years. Last year there were nearly 46,000 immigrants; in 2021, 28,500; in 2020, 8,466; in 2019, 1,843; In 2018, the first in which the British government began counting intercepted migrants, 299. It may sound alarming, but Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, last year detected around 330,000 irregular crossings of community borders. Some 105,000 people reached the coast of Italy.
When Brexit became a reality, with all its consequences, on December 31, 2020, the UK stopped applying Dublin III, the regulation that defines which country corresponds to the processing of an asylum application. It is usually the first to be reached by the applicant. London did not want to include refugee and asylum issues in its negotiations with Brussels. The result: Since then, the Conservative government has been aggressively seeking bilateral agreements with other EU countries – especially with France – and always gets the same response. It is a matter for the institutions of society to negotiate.
The solution was to pass a draconian law that, according to many experts, contradicts international law. “Thanks to this government, the UK’s historic reputation as a refugee-hosting land, which we were so proud of, is now a thing of the past,” laments Josie Naughton, director of refugee aid organization Choose Love. “It’s a law that effectively abolishes asylum for a lot of people,” he says.
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The new regimes were accompanied during the parliamentary process by a political campaign led by the slogan Stop the boats (Let’s Stop the Boats), which Snack included in a poster on his podium every time he took up the issue. And his secretary, Braverman, was not shy about referring to the arrival of illegal immigrants as an “invasion.”
From the approval of the legal text, all people who reach the coasts on boats that secretly cross the English Channel will see their asylum claims rejected as inadmissible. And unlike the current legislation, which imposes a five- to 10-year ban on re-entry on those expelled from the country for trying to enter the country illegally, Sunak’s government wants the ban to be for life. The new Law on Illegal Immigration will impose on the holder of the post of Minister of the Interior the obligation to deport all irregulars to third countries – as he has already tried in the case of Rwanda – “as soon as possible”.
The law would allow the government to commit human rights abuses without consequences. Excluding refugees and migrants from the protection of human rights law is abhorrent and wrong. Human rights are universal and the executive does not have the right to choose who deserves them and who does not,” denounced the Humanitarian Organization Liberty, which managed to collect the signatures and support of nearly 300 NGOs to continue the fight against Sunak’s immigration policy.
The Prime Minister promised at the beginning of his term that he would halve the number of people waiting to apply for asylum, and that he would put an end to the arrival of boats carrying illegal immigrants. The opposition Labor Party denounces the lack of means, organization and plans to ease the administrative bottleneck, although it avoids substantive criticism of the law, in order to avoid intimidating voters. Latest YouGov poll Indicates Three in four Britons (73%) think the government is responding to the migration crisis in an incompetent or chaotic manner. However, while only 15% of Conservative voters accuse Sunak of treating irregular arrivals to the UK harshly and unfairly, around 70% of Labor voters feel that way.
Minister Braverman, in the preamble to the new law, used an unusual caveat in which she pointed out the possibility that the text partially violated the European Convention on Human Rights (although at the same time she emphasized her conviction that this would not be the case in the end). The Conservative government has made it clear that it is willing to risk breaking international law in front of its constituents.
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