On Monday, the UK House of Commons will convene again to determine whether Rwanda is safe to forward asylum seekers before their admission to the UK is processed.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Friday vowed to keep Parliament sitting on Monday night until it passes legislation declaring Rwanda a “safe” destination to send asylum seekers, allowing deportation flights that were first mooted two years ago to get off the ground at last.
Meanwhile, with fears of this deal backfiring, the UK has also negotiated with Armenia, Botswana, Costa Rica and Côte d’Ivoire to establish “third-country asylum processing” partnerships.
The documents also listed several South American countries, including Brazil, Columbia, Ecuador, Paraguay and Peru, that are considered as “less likely to be interested”, and several African countries, including Angola, Cape Verde, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tanzania and Togo, that would be approached “if other targets failed”.
Several other countries, including the Gambia, Morocco, Namibia and Tunisia, are reported to have “explicitly declined” to negotiate with the UK.
On 15 April, almost exactly two years to the day since the Rwanda policy was originally proposed by then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, MPs rejected all of the amendments that had been introduced by the House of Lords in March.
There followed a series of votes in both houses which eventually resulted in the Lords adopting two amendments to the draft bill on 17 April.
One of the amendments called for any deportations to Rwanda to be suspended until a committee of experts could decide if the country was safe, while the other called for people who had previously assisted the UK military to be exempt from deportation.
Although the legislative process had been expected to have been completed on 17 April, another vote on the bill is now scheduled to take place in the House of Commons on 22 April.
Following the latest vote in the House of Lords, Home Secretary James Cleverly criticised opposition Labour members for delaying the adoption of the bill in what he described as a “politically cynical effort” and accused them of being “terrified that the Rwanda scheme will work”.
These people make their perilous journey and are fleeced off by traffickers, yet you still want to debate whether Rwanda is riskier. Stop playing pingpong with these miserable people. Send them over. They are victims of their governments and not Rwanda.