The British government is planning on giving failed asylum seekers up to £3,000 to voluntarily leave the country and relocate to Rwanda in a desperate bid to clear the ever-growing backlog of alleged asylum seekers.
A new separate deal with Rwanda will see failed asylum seekers will receive financial aid from the British taxpayer if they voluntarily choose to move to the East African nation.
The government, which has been bogged down in legal limbo over its previous Rwanda deportation scheme for illegal aliens, said that it does not believe new legislation would be necessary to pay failed asylum seekers to go to Rwanda as long as it is on a voluntary basis, the BBC reports.
Under current law, the government can provide up to £3,000 to failed asylum seekers to return to their “country of origin”. However, the voluntary returns scheme has never included a third-party country, meaning that the new deal with Rwanda would be the first of its kind.
The government handout would be made available to any migrant who had their asylum application rejected and therefore would encompass tens of thousands of people currently residing in the country.
Upon reaching Rwanda, the failed asylum seekers would also receive housing assistance from the government in Kigali, as well as being afforded assimilation assistance, education and training for work. Additionally, they would be given the opportunity to work towards citizenship in Rwanda.
Confirming the plans for the scheme, a Home Office spokesman said: “We are exploring voluntary relocations for those who have no right to be here to Rwanda, who stand ready to accept people who wish to rebuild their lives and cannot stay in the UK.”
“In the last year, 19,000 people were removed voluntarily from the UK and this is an important part of our efforts to tackle illegal migration.”
The scheme is separate from one that the government has been attempting to enact into law for nearly two years, in which those who enter the country illegally via the English Channel would be removed to asylum processing centres in Rwanda rather than putting them up in hotels throughout Britain, which has become the norm in recent years.
The plan was previously struck down last year as unlawful by the Supreme Court, which claimed that Rwanda was not a safe country under the dubious pretext that illegals may be deported by the African nation’s government as well.
The government has put forward alleged fixes to the legislation and will once again be debated in the House of Commons next week after attempts by the House of Lords to water down the law. Former Immigration Minister Robert Jenrick, who resigned late last year in protest to what he saw as the failures of the bill, argued that by refusing to remove the judicial review process for illegals seeking to block their removal from the country, the scheme will be bogged down by legal challenges from activist attorneys.
Jenkrick, as well as former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, has also echoed calls from populist figures such as Brexit boss Nigel Farage and Reform UK leader Richard Tice for the government to finally leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), whose court in Strasbourg controversially intervened in 2022 to block the first attempted migrant removal flight to Rwanda.
While the new Safety of Rwanda Bill supposedly permits government ministers to ignore the ECHR and Human Rights Act to remove illegals to Rwanda, it is unclear if this will pass legal muster given that the government of Rishi Sunak has refused to withdraw as a member from the ECHR, which is technically a separate institution from the European Union and therefore the UK’s membership was unaffected by Brexit.
Reform UK leader Richard Tice said last week that the only way to effectively deter illegal migration is to “leave the ECHR and you pick the boats up, [get] people out of the boats, and you safely take them back to Dunkirk and Calais, which we are legally entitled to do under two international maritime treaties, and nobody has proven me wrong because I am right.
“But none of these gutless, feeble people in the House of Commons – whether it is Starmer, Sunak, Cleverly, any of them – have got the guts to do it. That is the only way this will stop.”
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