Home Secretary James Cleverly has signed a new immigration treaty with Rwanda and said he intends to introduce emergency legislation to push through the policy in a bid to deter illegal immigrants who are using small boats to cross the English Channel in the hope of gaining asylum.
On Tuesday, Mr. Cleverly arrived in Kigali and signed the treaty with Rwanda’s foreign minister, Vincent Biruta, and he said, “We feel very strongly that this treaty addresses all of the issues raised by their lordships in the Supreme Court and we have worked very closely with our Rwandan partners to ensure that it does so.”
No Extra Money for Rwanda
“Let me make it clear. The Rwandan government has not asked for and we have not provided any funding linked to the signing of this treaty,” he said.
“The financial arrangement which inevitably comes as part of an international agreement reflects the costs that may be imposed on Rwanda through the changes that this partnership has created in their systems, in their legal systems and their institutions,” added Mr. Cleverly.
He said, “We want to see this part of our wider migration plan up and running as quickly as possible ... I really hope that we can now move quickly.”
Labour Calls It ‘Failing Policy’
Writing on X, formerly known as Twitter, the shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said: “It’s Groundhog Day. This is the 3rd Home Secretary in 18 months to take a cheque book to Rwanda. Hundreds of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money on a failing policy which should be used instead to stop the criminal smuggler gangs & fix the Tory asylum chaos.”In comments likely to infuriate the judiciary, Mr. Biruta suggested “internal UK politics” may have played a part in the Supreme Court’s judgment last month.
He said Rwanda would make sure its asylum process was “fair and transparent” and he said the country felt it had been “unfairly treated” by the courts, the media, and international organisations like the United Nations High Commissioner of Refugees (UNHCR) and Amnesty International.
Amnesty says on its website, “It [UNHCR] had previously raised concerns about Rwanda’s asylum process, citing arbitrary denial of access to the asylum procedure, risk of detention and deportation, discrimination against LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers and inadequate legal representation.”
In 1994 almost a million people—most of them from the Tutsi ethnic minority—were massacred in Rwanda in a genocide perpetrated by extremists from the Hutu majority. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) rebels—comprised of Tutsi refugees living outside the country—took over after the genocide and the RPF, under Mr. Kagame, remain in power having won successive elections.
On Tuesday, Mr. Cleverly visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial and said of Rwanda: “It has a political leadership, many of whom were themselves refugees in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. This is a government that takes their duty to the humane and professional treatment of refugees incredibly seriously, which is why we are working with them as a partner.”
He was asked if his government could “stop the boats” without the Rwanda policy and he said it was one of an “arsenal of responses” they were pursuing, adding, “We will pursue every avenue with energy until we stop the boats.”
“We intend to stop the boats as quickly as possible, I’m not going to set a deadline, I want to do it straight away, I want to do it as soon as possible,” said Mr. Cleverly, who is under intense political pressure to deliver on one of the prime minister’s key promises.
