Rishi Sunak faces critical vote on his renewed plan to send migrants to Rwanda

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British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has won a narrow victory in his effort to revive a controversial refugee agreement with Rwanda, but the battle is far from over, and his leadership is coming under increasing strain.

On Tuesday, MPs voted 313 to 269 to approve in principle legislation that would enact a treaty with Rwanda, under which the African country would take in hundreds of asylum seekers from Britain.

However, dozens of right-wing Conservative MPs said the proposed law doesn’t go far enough in ensuring that deportations will occur, and 29 of them abstained from voting on Tuesday. The group have said they want changes to the legislation, and they have signalled that they will vote against the bill at its final parliamentary stage if amendments aren’t made.

“We have decided collectively that we cannot support the bill tonight because of its many omissions,” Tory MP Mark Francois told reporters.

Mr. Sunak has made the Rwanda deal the centrepiece of his effort to crack down on thousands of small-boat crossings from France. More than 27,000 migrants from Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and other Middle Eastern countries have made the perilous journey across the English Channel this year, and the annual figure has more than doubled since 2020.

Britain struck the refugee agreement in 2022 in the hope of deporting thousands of undocumented migrants to Rwanda, where their refugee claims would be processed. Britain has agreed to cover the costs of running the program, which have soared to £240-million ($410-million), even though no migrants have been deported because the deal has been bogged down in legal challenges.

The most damning blow came last month, when a five-judge panel of the British Supreme Court unanimously found that the agreement was unlawful because Rwanda could not be considered a safe country.

The evidence “establishes substantial grounds for believing that there is a real risk that asylum claims will not be determined properly, and that asylum seekers will in consequence be at risk of being returned directly or indirectly to their country of origin,” the court found.

Mr. Sunak has argued that Tuesday’s implementing legislation, in combination with a new treaty signed with Rwanda last week, addresses the issues raised by the court.

He has said that the treaty and the legislation are designed to help Rwanda improve its refugee adjudication processes and ensure that Rwandan authorities do not deport unsuccessful claimants to another country. The legislation also says that “in the judgment of the UK parliament the Republic of Rwanda is a safe country.” And it overrides some human rights laws in order to limit the ability of asylum seekers to challenge their removal in British courts.

Human rights groups argue that simply declaring that Rwanda is safe won’t satisfy concerns raised by the judges, who cited many reports of political violence and repression. The court also found that Rwanda lacked the ability to properly adjudicate claims, and that it had little experience with refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.

Many right-wing Conservatives say claimants could still use British courts to delay or block their removal to Rwanda. And they say the legislation does not prevent the European Court of Human Rights from intervening to halt deportations on humanitarian grounds, as it did last year.

Mr. Sunak has insisted that the new law will ensure that removals to Rwanda begin as early as spring. He has also said that he will do whatever it takes to stop the ECHR from blocking flights to Kigali, the Rwandan capital. “The British people should decide who gets to come to this country – not criminal gangs or foreign courts,” he wrote on social media after Tuesday’s vote. “That’s what this bill delivers.”

Mr. Sunak has not said what action he would take if the ECHR were to issue an injunction. He also hasn’t said if he is prepared to pull Britain out of the European convention on human rights, which created the court.

He now faces a difficult balancing act to keep the legislation moving through Parliament.

Around 100 centrist Conservative MPs have said they will vote against the bill at the final stage if Mr. Sunak agrees to too many changes or drops Britain from the ECHR’s jurisdiction. On the other hand, the right-wing Tory group is pushing for amendments that will cut off all court challenges by refugee claimants and block any ruling by the ECHR.

The bill now moves to a parliamentary committee where those battles will begin.