At the eleventh hour on the evening of Tuesday 14 June 2022 some of the Conservative government’s worst nightmares came true, as the combined forces of protesters, progressive lawyers and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) prevented the take-off of a deportation flight to Rwanda. Further attempts at mass deportation under the ‘Rwanda scheme’ are now on hold pending the Tory leadership contest and legal hearings in September and October. However, regardless of whether Rishi Sunak or Liz Truss ends up at the helm, the government will continue attacking migrants and asylum seekers. NICKI JAMESON reports.
In the last FRFI we wrote about the government’s latest plans to avoid dealing with people coming to Britain seeking asylum, by the introduction of an Australian style ‘offshoring’ scheme. On 14 April British Home Secretary Priti Patel had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the government of Rwanda. This allows for asylum seekers arriving in Britain to be deported en masse to Rwanda and for their claims for refugee status to be processed there, with successful applicants resettled in Rwanda and unsuccessful ones deported back to the country they had fled.
Flight to Rwanda stopped
From mid-May immigration officers began serving notices on single adult male migrants to the effect that they would be removed to Rwanda, and on 31 May it was announced that the first flight would leave on 14 June. Those targeted had come to Britain from a wide range of countries, but predominantly from places such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria which Britain’s imperialist warmongering has been a key element in destabilising.
Both public protest and legal action began immediately. On 8 June 2022, four individual asylum seekers, together with charities Detention Action and Care4Calais, and the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union, which represents border force staff, lodged a claim for judicial review. Four further individual claimants were subsequently added to the claim. On 10 June, the High Court granted permission for the judicial review to proceed to a full hearing, but refused an application for an interim injunction preventing the removal of the individual claimants until the case had been decided. This was immediately appealed to higher courts which again refused to grant it.
Despite this setback, the majority of the men served with removal notices managed to contest them on an individual basis and their names were then taken off the flight list.
From 130 men served with notices that they would be on the flight, by Friday 10 June there were 31, and by the evening of Monday 13 June the plane was due to take off with fewer than ten people. By early evening on Tuesday 14 June – as direct action protesters from the Stop Deportations network locked themselves together with metal piping on the road outside Colnbrook immigration removal centre (IRC) to prevent coaches leaving – just seven men were due to fly.
Inside the IRCs other detainees were also protesting in solidarity with those facing removal and making sure they had access to lawyers and campaigners. Saman Anwar, who was detained in Colnbrook at the time, told FRFI:
‘Everyone was depressed, not knowing what was going to happen to them. One of the guys was on the phone to one of the people who was being taken to the plane to Rwanda. He was screaming and crying and asking for help, and saying they were beating him up at the airport – screaming this in Kurdish and other languages – they were trying to force him to get on the plane.
‘We all came out to the courtyard, shouting “no deportations to Rwanda”. People were protesting; some stopped eating … We heard about the protests outside – we were on the phone to protesters outside the detention centre; we came outside; we could hear the protests and they could hear us but we couldn’t see them because of the fence.’
On the evening of 14 June, as Spanish charter firm Privilege Style’s plane was on the tarmac at the Ministry of Defence airport at Boscombe Down ready to fly to Rwandan capital Kigali, Patel continued to insist the flight would go ahead, no matter how few passengers remained. The ECtHR then granted a last-minute application for interim measures by one of the remaining seven. The ECtHR said that ‘in the absence of any legally enforceable mechanism’ to ensure that KN – a 54-year-old Iraqi, who had arrived in Britain by boat – would be returned to Britain in the event that the judicial review waiting to be heard in the High Court succeeded, he should remain in Britain until the case had been decided.
This intervention then allowed lawyers for the other six men to reapply to the British courts for a stay. As the clock ticked, one by one the remaining detainees were granted interim orders until none remained.
Johnson, Patel et al were incandescent. Earlier in the day Johnson had accused lawyers challenging the deportations of ‘effectively … abetting the work of the criminal gangs’, prompting the Law Society and Bar Council to issue a joint statement calling on the Prime Minister ‘to stop attacks on legal professionals who are simply doing their jobs’. Now Patel insisted that ‘many of those removed from the flight would be put on the next’ and nodded in sympathy as backbench Tory MPs called for Britain to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
The full hearing of the judicial review was due to take place on 19-21 July but, following submissions from those bringing the case that this was too soon, has been put off until September. The challenges brought by a total of 15 individuals, alongside the PCS and three charities will be heard by the court on five days, beginning on 5 September. A separate challenge by the NGO Asylum Aid will be heard on 10-11 October. Judgement in all the cases will be given after the second hearing is complete.
Initially the government said that, despite the court proceedings, it would begin preparing for a second flight, in order to be ready to go immediately if it were to win the case; however this has now also been halted pending the outcome of the Tory leadership contest. The two remaining candidates, Sunak and Truss, have both declared they will continue with the Rwanda plan if elected. On 18 July the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee published a report into Channel crossings, migration and asylum. The report found that there was no evidence that the threat of deportation to Rwanda had a deterrent effect on asylum seekers crossing the Channel.
A very British Bill of Rights
Despite the sabre-rattling on the Conservative back benches, the British government is not currently planning to actually withdraw from the ECHR. It is, however, aiming to neutralise the Convention’s ability to interfere with its racist agenda. The Bill of Rights Bill, which was laid before Parliament on 22 June, is a wholesale attack on the ECHR, specifically designed to render its provisions subservient to the diktats of British politicians and make the judges of the ECtHR impotent to effect change in Britain on the basis of cases brought to the court.
The ECHR was developed after the Second World War by European nations keen to set out their progressive credentials, both in the wake of fascism and as a counter to the appeal of communism. In 1950 Britain was the Convention’s first signatory. In 1998 the Labour government passed the Human Rights Act (HRA), which made the provisions of the Convention part of domestic law from 2000 – a decision Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair immediately regretted, as his government sought to indefinitely detain suspected terrorists, in breach of Article 5 of the Convention.
The ECHR is a bourgeois charter, with clauses preserving rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association, family life, a fair trial and freedom from discrimination, but nothing enshrining a right to eat, be housed or be educated. Despite its shortcomings, both the Convention itself and the HRA have frequently been useful to oppressed groups and individuals battling the system’s attacks on them.
Some of the provisions of the new Bill of Rights are quite muddled and even lawyers trying to figure out the full implications at this stage are confused; however the overall intentions are clear: to render the ECHR toothless within British law and shift power from the courts to Parliament. The ‘burden on public authorities’ to comply with ‘positive obligations’ to safeguard human rights will be reduced; the powers of courts to uphold the rights of individuals against state bodies will be curtailed, and applicants will have to get over an increased number of hurdles to get their cases heard.
The publicity for the Bill is replete with references to bogeymen such as ‘terrorists opposing their placement in Separation Centres’ and of course ‘foreign criminals’, who it is claimed continue to use Article 8 of the ECHR (family life) to prevent their being deported at the end of their prison sentences. In reality, the combination of the Labour government’s 2007 ‘automatic deportation’ UK Borders Act, the ‘hostile environment’ measures introduced in 2016-18 by Theresa May and Brexit have already made it increasingly difficult for people convicted and imprisoned to fight deportation using Article 8.
Fighting racism
Further parliamentary discussion of the Bill is not going to take place before October. By then the Rwanda flights judicial review will have been heard and there will be a new Prime Minister. Whatever the outcome of the judicial review, it will undoubtedly make those in Parliament yet more determined to press ahead with further attacks on human rights – whether by deportation to Rwanda or to elsewhere. Whoever is in Downing Street, they will continue the vocal crusade to rid Britain of ‘illegal migrants’, be they asylum seekers who have crossed the Channel in small boats or ‘foreign criminals’ whose status here has been invalidated by their imprisonment.
Racist immigration laws are an intrinsic part of imperialist Britain’s fabric and their operation is a reflection of British foreign policy and ruling class interests. So, while some face detention and deportation, other would-be migrants to Britain are offered a smooth passage and some a red carpet. Between 18 March and 11 July 155,600 visas were issued to people fleeing the war in Ukraine, and on 6 May the government introduced a new High Potential Individual visa for graduates of a list of elite universities. The majority of universities on the list are in the US, with a few in other countries such as Switzerland, Hong Kong and Singapore, and none at all in Africa or South America. Meanwhile, outside of the Rwanda scheme, deportations have continued: on 30 June, 21 people were deported on a charter flight to Nigeria and Ghana, despite legal challenges and direct action protests.
We must take inspiration from the stopping of the 14 June flight to Rwanda and build a movement to fight Britain’s racist immigration laws. An injury to one is an injury to all.
FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 289 August/September 2022
