(London) The United Kingdom announced on Thursday that it had deported 46 people to Vietnam and East Timor on a chartered flight, a consequence of the new Labour government’s decision to abandon plans to send migrants to Rwanda.
Barely having come to power, the new Prime Minister Keir Starmer confirmed the abandonment of this controversial project launched in 2022 by the Conservative executive, but never brought to fruition.
Earlier this week, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said it would be replaced by a “serious returns programme” and that planned flights to Rwanda would be replaced by flights to return migrants to their home countries.
The plane, which operated on a chartered flight on Wednesday night, became the first ever chartered by the United Kingdom to East Timor and the first to Vietnam since 2022, the Home Office said in a statement.
It “shows that the government is acting quickly and decisively to secure our borders and return those who have no right to be here” to British soil, Mr.me Cooper, quoted in the press release.
The latter on Monday described the plan to deport people to Rwanda as a “waste” of public money, assuring that 700 million pounds (1.2 billion Canadian dollars) had been spent for nothing.
The abandoned plan was to send migrants – wherever they came from – to the African country, which would examine their asylum applications, with no possibility of returning to the UK whatever the outcome of the procedure.
The approach chosen by the new government is to give priority to the expulsion of migrants who have arrived irregularly to their country of origin when the latter is considered safe.
In order to stop the dangerous crossings of migrants across the Channel in inflatable boats, London also intends to strengthen its cooperation with its European neighbours and create a special command with new powers.
According to the Oxford University Immigration Observatory, Vietnamese people made up 20% of irregular arrivals between January and March this year.