The previous Conservative government’s policy was “never a deterrent,” the new prime minister said, describing it as “dead and buried.”
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said he will not continue the previous Conservative government’s policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda.
“The Rwanda project was dead and buried before it even started. It never had a deterrent effect,” Starmer said at his first press conference on Saturday after his Labour party’s landslide victory in the general election.
“I am not prepared to continue with gadgets that have no deterrent effect,” he told reporters after a cabinet meeting, describing the plan as a “problem we inherit.”
The controversial law was approved in April by parliament, which declared Rwanda a safe third country, bypassing an earlier ruling by the UK Supreme Court that said the project was illegal on human rights grounds.
Authorities began detaining asylum seekers in May.
The policy was pushed by then-prime minister Rishi Sunak, who had promised to stop migrants and asylum seekers arriving on small boats from mainland Europe.
Human rights campaigners and critics of Sunak’s government have denounced the plan to deport people to Rwanda rather than process asylum claims in the country as inhumane.
They raised concerns about the human rights situation in the East African country and said asylum seekers were at risk of being returned to countries where they would be in danger.
But in the face of opposition in parliament, Sunak said in April: “There are no ifs, no buts. These flights are destined for Rwanda.”
Tens of thousands of asylum seekers – many fleeing wars and poverty in Africa, the Middle East and Asia – have reached Britain in recent years by crossing the Channel in small boats on risky journeys organised by people-smuggling gangs.
At his press conference on Saturday, Starmer said the Rwanda project was largely doomed to failure.
“Everybody understood, especially the gangs that run this program, that the chances of ever going to Rwanda were so slim, less than 1 percent, that it was never a deterrent and the chances were that you wouldn’t go, you wouldn’t get processed and you’d stay here… in paid housing for a very, very long time,” he told reporters.
Agnes Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International, has called on the new Labour government to keep its campaign promise to abandon the Rwanda deal.
“Our asylum system must be focused on providing, in the fairest and most efficient way possible, the safety and certainty to which every refugee is entitled, regardless of their destination,” Callamard wrote in a social media post.
This, she added, is “fully consistent with our international obligations, the rule of law and fundamental respect for every human person.”
But Suella Braverman, a hardline Conservative on immigration who could replace Sunak as party leader, criticised Starmer’s plan.
“Years of hard work, laws passed through Parliament, millions of pounds spent on a project that, if it had been implemented properly, would have worked,” she said on Saturday. “There are big problems on the horizon, which I fear will be caused by Keir Starmer.”
With record numbers of people arriving in the UK in the first six months of the year, it is also unclear what Starmer will do differently to tackle the migration crisis.
Tim Bale, a professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, told the Associated Press news agency that the Labour government would have to find a solution to the problem of small boats crossing the Channel.
“We will have to find other solutions to deal with this particular problem.”
Meanwhile, reporting from London on Saturday afternoon, Al Jazeera’s Rory Challands said that apart from the Rwanda policy announcement, it remains unclear what Starmer’s Labour government will look like.
“There has been a lot of talk about the changes the government is going to bring to British life and politics,” Challands said, referring to the press conference.
“His main theme is that the years of Tory turmoil are over,” Challands added. “And for the first time in a long time, the country will be treated first by the government in power, rather than the party it came from.”
