Ruling against Britain’s Rwanda deal: not just British fault

Outsourcing asylum seekers to Rwanda is illegal, according to a London court. The justification is interesting – for Germany too.

Refugees at the port of Sania. The EU-Turkey deal does not allow Syrian refugees to be returned to Turkey without trial or allowed to enter. Photo: Imago

Britain should now not send refugees to Rwanda instead of sheltering them. With a second chance ruling in London on Thursday, the “Rwanda deal” from 2022, which has drawn criticism for the country worldwide, is likely to be dead.

Judgment is complex. “Rwanda Agreement” UN Not even declared illegal for violating the Refugee Convention. Rwanda’s status as a “safe third country” is being denied, for one reason only: Rwanda allegedly does not provide sufficient guarantees that asylum seekers there will be protected from deportation to their home country.

With this point, however, a practical basis now standard in international refugee policy is being questioned. UN Refugee Agency UNHCR Continues to Fly Asylum Seekers from Libya to Rwanda – Is It No Longer Possible? Even more complicated Judgment For the European Union and Germany. The EU-Turkey deal allows Greece to bring Syrian refugees to Turkey without trial or to let them in – but there are discussions at the highest political level about deporting Syrian refugees to Syria in Turkey. By the standards of the London judgment, the agreement was illegal.

This is not just a theoretical statement. The European Convention on Human Rights, the court believed, applies not only to the EU but to Europe as a whole. EU interior ministers have agreed to house refugees in camps at the EU’s external borders. But are refugees in EU neighbors like Tunisia or Turkey really safe from being deported against their will in the wrong direction? The EU is about to take the same wrong turn as Britain now having to leave. That is the real, paradoxical lesson of this London judgment.