I think I also heard that they can only process 1000 people (not sure is that is per annum) but it does seem a ridiculously expensive and inefficient way to go about things. Surely the best use of the money is to use to to find effective ways to smash the gangs and deal with the issue before people get into the boats to start with? It seems we are getting precious little for our payments to the French authorities at the moment. The other day I saw a film of two French officers confronting a gang launching a boat with zero success. Where was the back up on the beach? Why no boat calling in turn the dingy round?
Sunak had the perfect opportunity once the Supreme Court (it is not a foreign court by the way Rishi) had made their ruling to dump the plan and blame it on the outgoing Braverman. Instead he has doubled down on it as a sop to the right of his party. Wouldn’t it be great to have a PM with a backbone, a moral compass and a sense of decency and humanity?
There's a lot of confusion around how many people Rwanda could or would take from the UK. I've seen it suggested recently that it's about 200 per year. The UK government has previously said that this could scale up but who knows if that's true. I read the judgment issued by The Supreme Court and that said that although Rwanda takes a lot of refugees, most of them are from neighbouring African countries and Rwanda doesn't make them go through a formal process of applying for asylum as we understand it, they just accept them and put them in refugee camps where UNHCR take responsibility for processing and resettling them.
Rwanda has only formally processed a tiny number of other asylum applications. The Rwandan government says between 2019 and June 2022 they decided 152 asylum claims and most of those were from African countries. The judgment says they have "little to no experience of considering applications from most of the countries" that most UK asylum seekers come from. There's also a lot of concern in UNHCR about how the Rwandan asylum process (such as it is) works in practice with reports of people being refused by government bodies that do not have the legal authority to make the decision, failure to communicate decisions with reasons in writing and an apparently unsound appeals process (in fact since 2018 not one asylum decision has gone to appeal).
The pathological focus on the 'Rwandan solution' make no sense to me at all other than for the government it is more a symbolic rather than a practical and effective issue. I've also seen it suggested that it is part of wider strategy initiated by Dominic Cummins in 2019 to create arguments with UK courts with the aim of building political and public support for withdrawing from the ECHR.
www.google.com
Remind you of anyone else? Truly pathetic ... luckily I think most Brits see through the nonsence and Tice is no Trump/Gameshow Host.
