Rwanda, traced end to end

Abstraction convinces nobody. Rwanda is the purest test of the thesis, because it is the clearest case of an elected government's flagship policy stopped not by voters but by courts applying human-rights law. Here it is from the law to the outcome.

April 2022

The scheme is announced. People arriving irregularly would be sent to Rwanda to claim asylum there. The stated aim is deterrence.

14 June 2022

The first flight, carrying seven people, is grounded about two hours before departure by a single Strasbourg judge issuing a Rule 39 interim order, an out-of-hours injunction. Nobody flies.

December 2022

The High Court finds the policy lawful in principle, but orders the first individual cases to be reconsidered.

June 2023

The Court of Appeal rules the policy unlawful. Rwanda, it holds, is not a safe third country.

15 November 2023

The Supreme Court unanimously agrees. There are substantial grounds to believe people would face a real risk of being sent onward to danger (refoulement), breaching Article 3. For context, Rwanda made 228 asylum decisions in 2020, against roughly 19,000 in the UK.

2024

The government signs a binding treaty and passes the Safety of Rwanda Act, which legislates that Rwanda is a safe country as a matter of law and disapplies parts of the Human Rights Act. Parliament passes a law declaring a contested fact to be true.

July 2024

A new government scraps the scheme on its first day. After roughly two years and hundreds of millions of pounds, nobody had been removed under it.

What it proves, and what it doesn't

The mechanism is exactly as the thesis describes. A government majority passed the policy, and courts applying rights law vetoed it, then Parliament had to legislate a fact, and even then Strasbourg's Rule 39 could still ground a plane. Repeal would have removed both the domestic Article 3 route and the Rule 39 block. The legal veto Starkey points to is real.

But "the lawyers blocked it" is true and incomplete. The court's finding that Rwanda might send people back into danger may simply have been right on the facts. Rwanda's asylum system was tiny. And the Australian precedent suggests the deterrent that actually works is turnbacks at sea, not offshore processing, so Rwanda may have failed on cost and scale even if the law had allowed it. Both the thesis and its critics can claim this case. That is the honest reading.

Primary source: the Migration Observatory's full Q&A on the scheme and the ruling ↗