Voices: The Rwanda plan was illegal, inhumane – and has made the British government look foolish

The Rwanda plan to deport refugees was always outlandish, inhumane and practically flawed. Now, we know, it’s also unlawful. It’s over. The Treaty signed with so much fanfare by Priti Patel is irrelevant. The millions of pounds spent on it wasted. The boasts of successive Conservative prime ministers and home secretaries who proclaimed it as an innovative, world-leading flagship policy have been shredded. The decision by the Supreme Court is the end for the Rwanda Plan. There’s nowhere else to go. A triumph for a half dozen or so of desperate human beings seeking shelter, it is a disaster for the government.

Ministers should have seen this coming. Indeed, according to Suella Braverman’s bitter post-sacking letter to Rishi Sunak, she wanted a Plan B in case it was found to be unlawful – and despite her defiant protestations at the time, she may have had an inkling that it would eventually be struck down. At any rate, her “dream” of watching a plane load of terrified asylum seekers take off for Kigali will now never come true. Justice has been done.

But never mind Plan B: In truth, the Rwanda scheme should never have been Plan A in the first place, and certainly not featured in such a prominent position. It was never going to deal with more than a few hundred refugees in the first place, and probably never more than a few thousand – a fraction of the numbers arriving on small boats. Thus, it was never going to be much of a deterrent – and for those willing to risk death by drowning in the English Channel, not much of an extra risk factor in practice. The chances of being deported to central Africa were tiny.

Yet on the government’s logic, if the Rwandan plan as deterrent really was the main support for their efforts to “stop the boats” then that policy – one of Sunak’s so-called five people’s priorities – has also just been demolished.

It was an avoidable error. The government didn’t do its homework about how safe and reliable the Rwandan asylum system is, or if it did it chose to ignore it and press on regardless – a typical Boris Johnson approach. The UN agencies and the British courts did bother to take a careful look at how Rwanda treats refugees, and the Supreme Court laid out the evidence with devastating effect.

What next? Leaving the European Convention on Human Rights? The Supreme Court is very careful to stress that it is not just the ECHR that stands in the way of the Rwanda plan. There is also a range of British legislation and United Nations conventions and treaties that in effect render the Rwanda plan unworkable and unlawful, and thus a British government determined to deprive refugees of their human rights will need to repeal multiple UK laws and leave UN conventions.

Besides, the ECHR is an essential part of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement and the EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement. So they’d need to be renegotiated. The Rwanda plan is therefore impossible to implement. It should never have happened, and it makes the government and the country look foolish.