Keir Starmer scrapped the Rwanda asylum plan.attofishpi wrote: ↑Mon Aug 05, 2024 12:40 pm Harbal, did Starmer ONCE mention the issue at hand --> addressing uncontrolled borders?
The real problem is that the UK is one of the countries that in the past pushed for the 1951 Refugee Convention and helped creating the UNHCR:https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/new-uk ... 2024-07-06
At his first press conference since becoming prime minister, Starmer said that the Rwanda policy would be scrapped because only about 1% of asylum seekers would have been removed and it would have failed to act as a deterrent.
"The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started. It's never been a deterrent," Starmer said. "I'm not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don't act as a deterrent."
The Rwanda asylum plan was in violation of the otherwise generous provisions of the Convention:https://www.unhcr.org/uk/what-we-do/uk- ... artnership
UNHCR believes that the UK-Rwanda arrangement will shift responsibility for making asylum decisions and protecting refugees. Externalizing asylum obligations poses serious risks for the safety of refugees. The arrangement proposes an asylum model that undermines global solidarity and the established international refugee protection system. It is not compatible with international refugee law.
There is no provision in the Refugee Convention that allows a country to object to new refugees on grounds of being full of refugees already or that its maximum absorption capacity has been reached already.The cornerstone of the 1951 Convention is the principle of non-refoulement contained in Article 33. According to this principle, a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.
Other rights contained in the 1951 Convention include:
The right not to be expelled, except under certain, strictly defined conditions (Article 32)
The right not to be punished for irregular entry into the territory of a contracting State (Article 31)
The right to non-discrimination (Articles 3 and 5)
The right to decent work (Articles 17 to 19 and 24)
The right to housing, land and property, including intellectual property (Articles 13, 14 and 21)
The right to education (Article 22)
The right to freedom of religion (Article 4)
The right to access to justice (Article 16)
The right to freedom of movement within the territory (Article 26 and Article 31 (2))
The right to be issued civil, identity and travel documents (Articles 12, 27 and 28)
The right to social protection (Articles 23 and 24 (2-4)).
Any notion of "maximum absorption capacity" would effectively turn the Convention into a dead letter and allow countries around the world to arbitrarily reject refugees. If they start doing that, it may actually result in an increase of refugees trying to migrate to Europe.
This is more or less what happened in 2015 when the EU refused to provide Turkey with funds to assist the Syrian refugees. Turkey then stopped holding back over a million Syrian refugees from crossing in the Europe.
Given the complexity of the matter and its global nature, the Rwanda asylum plan might actually have backfired.
The situation is a bit like with Brexit. In theory, it would have restored some sovereignty to the UK. In practice, it didn't.
