The spiritual leaders of the Anglican Church on Sunday strongly attacked the highly controversial agreement between the government of Boris Johnson and Kigali to send asylum seekers who arrived illegally in the United Kingdom to Rwanda.
The agreement announced Thursday is the subject of strong criticism, in particular from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and NGOs.
It aims to deter dangerous crossings of the English Channel, which is booming despite Brexit promises to better control the borders.
In his Easter sermon, the Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby said sending asylum seekers abroad raises “serious ethical questions”.
“The principle must stand up to the judgment of God and it cannot,” he said.
“He cannot bear the weight of the national responsibility of our country formed by Christian values, because outsourcing our responsibilities, even to a country that seeks to do good like Rwanda, is the opposite of the nature of God who himself took responsibility for our failures,” he continued.
Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell said it was “so depressing and heartbreaking” to “see that asylum seekers fleeing war, famine and oppression” will “not be treated with dignity and compassion which are the right of every human being”. “We can do better than that,” he said.
The Home Office highlights the “unprecedented scale of migration crisis” facing the world, with a spokesperson highlighting the “changes needed to prevent dastardly smugglers from putting people’s lives at risk and to fix our broken asylum system.
Around 28,500 people crossed the English Channel in small boats in 2021 – a year marked by a shipwreck that left at least 27 dead – compared to 8,466 the previous year. Since the beginning of the year, they are already more than 6000.
“Mutiny”
According to an exchange of letters published by the Home Office, the ministry’s top official, Matthew Rycroft, stressed the day before the Rwanda deal was announced his doubts both about the expected “chilling effect” of the device and its cost.
To which Minister Priti Patel retorted that it would be “reckless” in her eyes to delay a measure which, “we believe, will reduce illegal immigration, save lives and ultimately break the economic model of gangs of smugglers”.
This is how the minister overrode these objections by ordering the immediate implementation of the measure, via a procedure used only for the second time in 30 years at the Ministry of the Interior, according to the British press.
For Tahsin Tarek, a 25-year-old glazier from Erbil, capital of Kurdistan in Iraq, who is saving to finance a new trip to Europe, the British announcement is a game-changer.
“I’m going to think about another country,” the young man told AFP on Saturday, for whom “living here and enduring the difficulties here is better than living in Rwanda”.
“I don’t think anyone is going to accept this decision and go live there. If they give the refugees a choice between being deported to Rwanda or their country, they will choose their own country”.
As soon as the device was announced on Thursday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said he expected legal action from associations.
In the press on Saturday, both the Guardian (left) and the Daily Telegraph (right) spoke of the risk of “mutiny” within the civil service, with FDA union general secretary Dave Penman highlighting the prospect that civil servants are demanding to leave the Ministry of the Interior or even the administration.
“Of the most divisive policies,” he said in the Guardian, “the choice for officials is to implement them or leave.”