Home Office lawyers insisted, monday, there is a ‘strong public interest’ in deterring migrants from making the ‘perilous’ journey across the Channel as judges consider the fate of the Rwanda scheme .
The Government is challenging a Court of Appeal ruling from June that the multimillion-pound deal – which would see asylum seekers deported to the east African nation – was unlawful.
Sir James Eadie KC, representing Suella Braverman’s department, said the Government attached ‘considerable importance’ to its Rwanda deportation policy.
The barrister said there was ‘a serious and pressing need to take effective steps that will act as a deterrent to those undertaking the perilous and sometimes life-threatening journey, typically across the Channel, from a safe country’. He added that such journeys were often ‘facilitated by people smugglers’.
Sir James said there was a ‘strong public interest in the legitimate, and indeed key, policy aim’.
At the start of the three-day hearing today Sir James said that the policy to remove people to ‘a country less attractive’ than the UK, ‘but nevertheless safe’, is lawful.
‘The appeal is, at its heart, about the judgments made by the Government about the future conduct of a friendly foreign state – Rwanda,’ he told a panel of five justices.
The barrister said both countries are ‘committed’ to the deal, with ‘very powerful’ practical incentives for Rwanda to comply with the assurances given.
Sir James later referenced concerns that had been raised over the policy and Rwanda’s history, including by the UN Refugee Agency UNHCR.
The barrister continued: ‘Both the Government and the Rwandan government were fully aware of the likely controversy of the arrangements that were made when the deal was signed.’
Sir James said: ‘The UK cannot possibly seek to resolve those issues. That does not mean that those concerns having been received should be ignored, quite the contrary.’
The barrister added: ‘Whatever debates there might have been… it is, at best, peripheral. This is a new context with a new set of detailed arrangements.’
The UNHCR, which has intervened in the legal challenges over the policy, previously said Rwanda ‘lacks irreducible minimum components of an accessible, reliable, fair and efficient asylum system’.
In the agency’s written submissions to the Supreme Court, Angus McCullough KC said it had ‘consistently expressed grave concerns’ about the safety and legality of the policy.
He continued: ‘UNHCR maintains its unequivocal warning against the transfer of asylum seekers to Rwanda under the UK-Rwanda Arrangement.’
Several asylum seekers who were set to be deported on the first planned flight to Rwanda in June 2022 – which was grounded minutes before take-off following a ruling by a judge at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg – are opposing the appeal.
