According to the bill presented on Tuesday, arrivals will be held and then returned either to their country of origin or to a third country. “A clear violation of the UN Convention on Refugees”, denounces the UNHCR.
by Cécile Ducourtieux (London, correspondent)
The bill against illegal immigration presented Tuesday, March 7 is not the first attempt by a British conservative government to stop the phenomenon of migrants’ pneumatic canoes that cross the English Channel, but it is probably the attempt more controversial to date. The Minister of the Interior, Suella Braverman, introduced this new text to the House of Commons, which makes it possible to refuse any person arriving on the Kent by Kent by pneumatic boat the right to request asylum in the United Kingdom – the Ministry counted 45,000 passages via these frail boats in 2022. The text raises many moral, legal and practical questions.
With the only exception of minors and very sick people, arrivals will be detained and then returned to their country of origin if it is “safe” or to a third country also deemed “safe” by London, as the Rwanda, with which the United Kingdom has signed an already highly contested agreement of subcontracting of its asylum requests in 2022. Attempts to invoke protective laws-British law “Modern anti-slavery” for example-will not be examined that once the person expelled.
“It is unfair that people who have gone through a whole series of safe countries, then have illegally arrived in the United Kingdom, abuse our asylum system. This must stop,” said Suella Braverman, who, well May she be the daughter of immigrants of Indian origin, made the lawyer of an assumed anti -migrant policy and is regularly criticized by Labor and NGOs for her provocative rhetoric – she had described as “invasion “The arrivals of pneumatic canoes in 2022.
The bill is “hard but necessary,” said Rishi Sunak at a press conference on Tuesday. Considered a moderate, the British Conservative Prime Minister, also of Indian origin, nevertheless made the fight against crossings of the Channel one of his priorities. He responds to an pressing request from the elected officials of his camp, worried that one of the main promises of Brexit (“regain control” of the borders) was not held. In fact, the passages have been multiplied by more than twenty in four years (less than 1,900 crossings were recorded in 2019).
The leader hopes that migration will constitute one of the great subjects of the Franco-British summit, Friday March 10 in Paris. Unlike the French, who would prefer to insist on a moment of reconciliation – the first of its kind since 2018 -, after years of tensions sharpened by the excesses of Boris Johnson, then Prime Minister.
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