British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that his administration will not proceed with the previous Conservative government’s policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
“The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started. It’s never been a deterrent,” Starmer said during his first news conference on Saturday, following his Labour Party’s landslide victory in the general election. “I’m not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don’t act as a deterrent,” he told reporters after a cabinet meeting, describing the plan as a “problem that we are inheriting.”
The contentious law, approved in April, declared Rwanda a safe third country, bypassing an earlier UK Supreme Court ruling that deemed the scheme unlawful on human rights grounds. The authorities had started detaining asylum seekers in May.
Then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had championed the policy as part of his efforts to stop migrants and asylum seekers from arriving on small boats from mainland Europe. Rights activists and critics of Sunak’s government had condemned the plan to deport people to Rwanda as inhumane, citing concerns about Rwanda’s human rights record and the risks asylum seekers faced if returned to dangerous countries. Despite opposition, Sunak had insisted in April: “No ifs, no buts. These flights are going to Rwanda.”
Tens of thousands of asylum seekers, many fleeing wars and poverty in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, have reached Britain in recent years by crossing the English Channel in small boats on perilous journeys organized by people-smuggling gangs.
At his news conference, Starmer said the Rwanda scheme was widely expected to fail. “Everybody has worked out, particularly the gangs that run this, that the chance of ever going to Rwanda was so slim, less than 1 percent, that it was never a deterrent,” he stated.
Agnes Callamard, secretary general of Amnesty International, urged the new Labour government to follow through on its campaign promise to scrap the Rwanda pact. “Our asylum system must focus on delivering as fairly and efficiently as possible the security and certainty to which every refugee is entitled however they may arrive,” Callamard wrote in a social media post, emphasizing compliance with international obligations, the rule of law, and basic respect for human rights.
Suella Braverman, a Conservative hardliner on immigration and a potential contender to replace Sunak as party leader, criticized Starmer’s decision. “Years of hard work, acts of Parliament, millions of pounds been spent on a scheme which had it been delivered properly would have worked,” she said. “There are big problems on the horizon which will be I’m afraid caused by Keir Starmer.”
With a record number of people arriving in the UK in the first six months of the year, it remains unclear what Starmer will do differently to address the migration crisis. Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University of London, told the Associated Press that the Labour government needs to find a solution to the small boats crossing the English Channel. “It’s going to have to come up with other solutions to deal with that particular problem.”
Reporting from London on Saturday, Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands noted that aside from the Rwanda policy announcement, it remains unclear what Starmer’s Labour government will look like. “There was a lot of talk about change that the government is going to bring to British life and British politics,” said Challands. “His main theme is that the years of Conservative tumult are done,” Challands added. “And for the first time in a long time, the country is going to be treated first by the government in power, rather than the party that it comes from.”