Hi John,
MPs are voting tomorrow on Rishi Sunak’s latest attempts to send people seeking safety in this country to Rwanda.
The Conservative Party is busy discussing whether the plans are cruel and draconian enough to satisfy their backbench MPs – but it’s vital that we raise our voices to say this whole policy is wrong, wrong, wrong.
It’s the wrong way to treat people asking for sanctuary, it’s the wrong way to tackle the asylum backlog, and it’s the wrong way to prevent people risking their lives in the Channel. We need a total rethink.
Can you write to your MP now and demand they vote against this latest Rwanda plan? It only takes a couple of minutes. At this crucial time we need MPs of all parties to know that this downward spiral of cruelty is not being conducted in our names.
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The new bill follows the decision last month by Britain’s highest court, the Supreme Court, that deporting people seeking asylum to Rwanda is illegal, because Rwanda is not a safe country.
Rather than addressing the root cause of the problem – that this is a bad idea being introduced for the wrong reasons – the government is now passing a law that says ‘Rwanda is a safe country’. It’s nonsense – they might as well introduce a law that says ‘the earth is not heating up’, ‘big corporations are paying their tax’ or ‘life-saving medicines are available to all’.
Almost everything about the Rwanda plan is morally bankrupt. This government doesn’t care about the safety of people risking their lives in the Channel – they’re prepared to send them to a country where they can’t control what happens to them, and they can’t control whether they’re deported back to where they’re fleeing from.
This government isn’t trying to tackle the asylum backlog and its spiralling costs – it has so far wasted £290 million on the Rwanda plan, including £100 million promised by Suella Braverman in one of her final acts, on a plan that is probably still illegal. That money could have been invested in giving the asylum system the capacity it needs to process claims fairly and in a reasonable length of time.
But the most dishonest part of this government’s plan is that it is outsourcing its responsibilities to offer asylum to people fleeing persecution and human rights abuses around the world. The idea that anyone arriving in Britain ‘illegally’ should be deported to Rwanda before their claim is even heard is outrageous – and all the more so when, for people from the vast majority of countries, there are essentially no ‘legal’ routes to claim asylum in the UK .
As MPs consider which way to vote tomorrow, it is urgent that they hear from constituents who want them to stand against this escalating cruelty. Can you write to your MP now?
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Global Justice Now believes that people seeking asylum deserve to be treated with humanity and compassion. Britain has contributed historically, and continues to contribute today, to many of the reasons people are forced to move, and it already takes in far fewer refugees proportionally than many countries in the global south.
There is no small boats crisis – there are only the crises of war, of human rights abuses, and of environmental destruction, that are forcing people to leave their homes.
At times like this it can feel like there is nothing to be done to halt the political bidding war of anti-refugee sentiment. But the posturing of Conservative MPs for the benefit of the right-wing media is not representative of wider society. It is vital that people who stand for global justice continue to stand up for what is right, now more than ever.
Thanks for everything you’re doing.
Jonathan Stevenson
Global Justice Now
More info
1. Gary Lineker and Brian Cox back call to scrap Rwanda scheme, Guardian, 11 December 2023
2. UK paid Rwanda additional $126 mln for contested migrant plan, Reuters, 8 December 2023
3. The west’s dumping of migrants on poor countries is a grisly echo of penal transportation, Kenan Malik, 10 December 2023
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