Warning About Endless Legal Challenges
In her article, Ms. Braverman said the plan cooked up by Mr. Sunak and Mr. Cleverly was likely to get mired in further legal challenges.She said what was needed was to pass legislation which, “excludes all avenues of legal challenge.”
“The entirety of the Human Rights Act and European Convention on Human Rights, and other relevant international obligations, or legislation, including the [U.N.] refugee convention, must be disapplied by way of clear ‘notwithstanding’ clauses,” said Ms. Braverman.
The former home secretary—who is expected to challenge for the leadership of the Conservative Party if Mr. Sunak loses the election next year—also suggested Parliament sit over Christmas to ensure the new law is passed.
Her call on the Rwanda policy has echoes of Boris Johnson’s 2019 election manifesto pledge to “get Brexit done.”
Ms. Braverman wrote: “The more fundamental question is where does ultimate authority in the United Kingdom sit? Is it with the British people and their elected representatives in Parliament? Or is it with the vague, shifting, and unaccountable concept of ‘international law’?”
‘There Must be no More Magical Thinking’
“Above all, it demands of the government an end to self-deception and spin. There must be no more magical thinking. Tinkering with a failed plan will not stop the boats,” Ms. Braverman added.The proposed UK-Rwanda treaty would tackle the issue of refoulement—a legal term meaning the danger of those who fled to the UK and whose applications for asylum are then rejected by the Rwandan government being sent back to the country from which they first fled—which concerned the Supreme Court judges.
The treaty is expected to put in place legal safeguards which the Rwandan government would have to observe.
But Ms. Braverman wrote in the Telegraph, “amending our agreement with Rwanda and converting it into a treaty, even with explicit obligations on non-refoulement, will not solve the fundamental issue.”
Instead, she suggested, “embedding UK observers and independent reviewers of asylum decisions” into the Rwanda process.
But the former Cabinet minister, Damian Green, has described her five-point plan as “profoundly unconservative.”
Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Mr. Green referred to it as an effort to, “pass a law to block all those other laws” and said: “I would specifically dislike and oppose that proposal.”
Mr. Green, who remains a Conservative MP, said: “It’s not just all our own laws passed by Parliament, and all international treaties that we have signed, that Suella wants to sweep away. She specifically says let’s sweep away all judicial review protection, and all common law protections, and that’s why I said on Twitter that this is the most unconservative proposal I have ever heard.”
“Conservatives believe in a democratic country run by the rule of law. And dictators, Xi and Putin, would prefer to have the state completely untrammelled by any law. And so, as a democrat, I oppose it,” added Mr. Green, who served in Cabinet under Theresa May.