The government’s controversial Rwanda immigration policy unlawfully exposes asylum seekers to a ‘significant risk’ of torture and that they will be returned to the countries from which they fled, the High Court heard today.
Seven individuals who face having their claims processed in the central African country are challenging the policy, along with charities Care4Calais and Detention Action and the Public and Commercial Services union.
They argue that the Home Office’s agreement with Rwanda is unlawful as it exposes asylum seekers to a ‘real risk’ of breaches of their right to freedom from inhuman or degrading treatment under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
The claimants also say the Home Office wrongly concluded that Rwanda is a ‘safe third country’, despite evidence of its ‘very poor human rights record and asylum processes [which are] considerably inferior to those in the UK’.
Raza Husain QC told the court this morning that ‘Rwanda is in substance a one-party, authoritarian state with extreme levels of surveillance which does not tolerate political opposition or criticism’, adding: ‘It is a regime which repeatedly imprisons, tortures and murders those who it considers to be its opponents.’
Rwanda’s processes for dealing with asylum seekers are deficient, Husain argued, saying that ‘decision makers are untrained’, that there is ‘just one official to manage eligibility’ and that the ‘judiciary is politically captured’.
The Home Office’s objective of deterring illegal entry to the UK through the policy also renders it unlawful, as it is ‘inappropriate to weigh Article 3 [ECHR] harm against objectives such as … deterrence or saving lives by preventing Channel crossings’.
However, Lord Pannick QC – leading the Home Office’s counsel team – argued that ‘there is no risk of harm to any of the individual claimants in Rwanda’. ‘All the individual claimants who have received [removal directions] for removal to Rwanda have been preapproved by Rwanda for the purposes of processing their asylum claims,’ he said in written submissions. ‘There is no risk of them being refused entry.’
He added: ‘Even if they are not granted refugee status in Rwanda, there is no risk of their being removed from Rwanda to their country of origin. Rwanda does not conduct forcible removals to the countries of which these claimants are nationals.’
The hearing before Lord Justice Lewis and Mr Justice Swift is due to conclude on Friday and it is expected that judgment will be reserved.
