The British government went to the front on Wednesday to defend its plan to drastically restrict the right of asylum to put an end to illegal crossings of the Channel, strongly denounced by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.
This text presented on Tuesday makes asylum inaccessible to migrants who have arrived illegally, the conservative government of Rishi Sunak, struggling in the polls, hoping to discourage the tens of thousands of Channel crossings that take place each year on boats of Fortune.
It provides for the rapid expulsion of migrants arriving in this way. It prohibits them from applying for asylum and subsequently settling in the UK or applying for British nationality. It also facilitates the detention of migrants until their deportation to a third country deemed safe.
This bill, which comes after previous tightening of immigration legislation, has raised a volley of green wood from refugee aid associations, which consider it contrary to international law.
On Wednesday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said he was “deeply concerned”.
“Such a blanket ban preventing people from seeking asylum and other forms of international protection in the UK would be at odds with the UK’s human rights and refugee law obligations,” Volker said. Turk.
“The legislation also raises several specific human rights concerns, including the violation of the right to individual scrutiny and the prohibition of refoulement and collective expulsions, as well as the arbitrary detention of immigrants.”
The day before, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees had accused London of wanting to “put an end to the right of asylum”.
Ex-footballer Gary Lineker, now a star BBC presenter, on Twitter compared the government’s language on refugees to “that used by Germany in the 1930s”, drawing the ire of Tory MPs.
The public audiovisual group promised to have a “frank conversation” with him.
“Priority of the British”
“It is precisely because we want to help the most vulnerable people in the world […] that we must ensure that our system is no longer exploited and overtaken by illegal migrants,” Rishi Sunak insisted in Parliament on Wednesday in the face of opposition attacks.
“Stopping the boats is not just my priority, it is the priority of the British,” he added.
Before him, Interior Minister Suella Braverman, a hardliner on immigration, had worked to respond to criticism: “It’s not racist to say that we have too many illegal immigrants are abusing our asylum system”.
The government says it is “confident” that its text is compatible with international law. But in a letter attached to the bill, he admits that he cannot fully confirm that the text respected the European Convention on Human Rights.
Rishi Sunak, who has made immigration control one of his priorities, said he was ready to lead the legal battle around the text in order to “regain control of our borders once and for all”.
He is expected in France on Friday to meet French President Emmanuel Macron, a few months after the signing of an agreement between London and Paris aimed at strengthening their cooperation in the fight against illegal immigration.
London pleads in particular for migrants to file their asylum application in the first safe country they reach.
Last year, more than 45,000 migrants arrived in the UK across the English Channel on small boats, and more than 3,000 since the start of the year. The crossing is perilous, and in November 2021, at least 27 people died in a shipwreck, the worst migration drama recorded in the Channel.
These migrants, many of whom seek asylum in the country, are accommodated in hotels at state expense, sometimes causing local tensions, especially as the asylum system struggles to process this influx of applications.