UN refugee chief: UK deportation policy to Rwanda 'all wrong', sets catastrophic precedent
The United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) has censured as "all wrong" an imminent plan by the British government to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, warning that the move would create a catastrophic precedent for other countries.
"This is all wrong, this deal, for so many different reasons," Filippo Grandi told journalists at a press briefing in the Swiss city of Geneva on Monday, adding, "The precedent that this creates is catastrophic for a concept that needs to be shared like asylum.”
Grandi said there are many countries in Africa and elsewhere that are far poorer than Britain but are hosting hundreds of thousands and even millions of refugees.
The UN refugee chief said Britain with its advanced structures and large resources should not be "exporting its responsibility to another country.”
Grandi said Rwanda was "quite good to refugees," as it has already taken in and dealt efficiently with tens of thousands from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi. However, he stressed that the African country's structures and resources are vastly different from those found in Britain, and that the country is not equipped to adopt the UK system for refugee status determination.
Grandi reiterated the UNHCR's position that exporting asylum seekers was not the way to address the issue.
"The UK says... we do this to save people from dangerous journeys. Let me doubt that a little bit," he told the presser, adding, "Saving people from dangerous journeys is great, is absolutely great. But is that the right way to do it? I don't think so."
More than 10,000 migrants have made the journey so far this year.
Under a deal, signed off by British Home Secretary Priti Patel and praised by Prime Minister Boris Johnson, the migrants and asylum-seekers illegally entering Britain would be sent thousands of miles away to Rwanda.
Johnson has claimed that the deal would stop human smugglers from sending desperate migrants on treacherous journeys across the English Channel.
Earlier this month, Patel announced that the first deportation flight to Rwanda would leave on June 14.
A UK court decided on Monday that the first flight to take migrants arriving illegally in Britain to Rwanda can go ahead on Tuesday after judges dismissed campaigners' attempts to win an injunction to stop it.
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