NAfter losing a court dispute over his asylum deal with Rwanda, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak still wants to pass the plans through “emergency legislation”. This is intended to prevent further obstruction by Great Britain or the European Court of Human Rights, Sunak said during a press conference in London on Wednesday.
“I will not allow a foreign court to block these flights,” Sunak said, referring to the planned extradition flights to Rwanda. According to commentators, this could indicate that the Conservative government wants to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights or simply ignore the rulings of the Strasbourg court.
In the summer of 2022, the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg stopped the only scheduled flight with asylum seekers to Rwanda with a last-minute interim order.
Sunak also said he would use planned “emergency legislation” to ensure Rwanda is classified as a safe third country by parliament in London. “I will do whatever it takes to get these planes off the ground,” he said.
Sunak’s plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, regardless of their origin, could never allow them to return to Britain, the Supreme Court ruled on Wednesday. The Supreme Court argued that asylum seekers in the East African country risk not receiving a fair trial and risk being deported to their home countries despite a legitimate claim to asylum. Sunak has now said that a new deal with Rwanda will ensure that asylum seekers cannot be deported from the East African country.
With this scheme, Great Britain wants to prevent illegal immigration in small boats across the English Channel. The United Nations refugee agency has condemned Britain’s actions as a violation of international law.
FDP politician Stamp still believes in a third country solution
Despite a negative ruling by the highest British court, Joachim Stamp (FDP), the federal government’s migration commissioner, is sticking to the third country rule for Germany. “I stick to my assessment that third-country regulation is desirable, but there is still no suitable state willing to do so under the rule of law,” Stamp told “Spiegel” magazine.
The ruling in Great Britain did not rule out the possibility of third-country proceedings, “but rather the current legal situation in Rwanda,” the Migration Commissioner continued. So the topic “needs to be discussed more objectively”. But it is also clear that “comprehensive change does not just fall from the sky,” added Stamp, who is in charge of the Union Home Ministry.
The FDP politician, who took office last spring, wants to conclude readmission agreements between the federal republic and the states to facilitate the deportation of rejected asylum seekers in Germany and at the same time implement legal immigration options.
Frank Schwabe, an SPD member of the Bundestag, recently wrote an article with two other members of the SPD parliamentary group in favor of outsourcing asylum procedures to non-EU countries. “The British courts would do well to put the government in its place,” Schwabe told “Spiegel.” “For me and for us, the main thing is that we have constitutional procedures and acceptable structural conditions,” said a spokesman for the SPD parliamentary committee on human rights and humanitarian aid. “This is our absolute basic requirement for operations in third countries.”
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