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The UK Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that the government’s policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda is unlawful, in a major blow to Rishi Sunak’s government.
Lord Robert Reed, president of the Supreme Court, said asylum seekers sent to Rwanda would be at real risk of being repatriated to their countries of origin without proper consideration of their claims.
“There are substantial grounds for believing that the removal of the claimants to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill-treatment by reason of refoulement,” the Supreme Court said in its judgment.
Refoulement is the forced return of asylum seekers to their home countries when they are likely to face persecution. Reed said the court had made the decision unanimously.
Sunak said the ruling was “not the outcome we wanted” but added that “we have spent the last few months planning for all eventualities and we remain completely committed to stopping the boats”.
The prime minister also suggested the government may seek to identify other potential countries for a deportation scheme.
“When people know that if they come here illegally, they won’t get to stay then they will stop coming altogether, and we will stop the boats,” he said.
The agreement with Rwanda has been a showpiece policy of successive Conservative governments and is a central part of Sunak’s drive to “stop the boats” and crack down on irregular immigration.
The Supreme Court’s decision leaves a hole in Sunak’s migration policy and will fuel demands by Conservative MPs for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.
Suella Braverman, who was sacked as home secretary by Sunak this week, is a key proponent of the Rwanda policy and warned on Tuesday that the prime minister “failed to prepare any sort of credible Plan B”.
She argued that if Sunak did not want to leave the ECHR, he would have to “block off” the convention, the Human Rights Act and “any other obligations which inhibit our ability to remove those with no right to be in the UK”.
Reed stressed in the judgment on Wednesday that the ECHR was not the only legal basis for the court’s decision, saying the UK was bound by other treaties including the UN convention for refugees.
On the basis of evidence from the UN refugee agency, the court upheld an earlier decision by the court of appeal, which found that there were real risks that asylum seekers sent to Rwanda could be removed to their countries of origin in potential breach of the UN convention.
“The changes needed to eliminate the risk of refoulement may be delivered in future, but they have not been shown to be in place now,” Reed said.
Braverman has long advocated leaving the ECHR, but such a move would create further tensions in Sunak’s party. Many Tory MPs, particularly those representing liberal-minded seats in southern England, are vehemently opposed to the idea.
Natalie Elphicke, Tory MP for Dover, said the Supreme Court’s decision on Rwanda means “the policy is effectively at an end”. “No planes will be leaving and we now need to move forward,” she wrote on social media platform X.
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