Refugees fleeing conflicts or persecution do not have the luxury of entering Britain legally. If they had the time and opportunity to apply for a UK visa they would not in essence be refugees. Seeking asylum routinely involves entering a territory without prior permission.
Regards the Boris Johnson and Priti Patel planned deportation of refugees Gillian Triggs, the assistant high commissioner at the UNHCR, accused the UK of “attempting to shift its burden to a developing country” and warned that the arrangement signed off by Patel “would not comply with the UK’s international legal responsibilities”, adding: “All the indications are that it will be unworkable.”
The proposals seemed designed to appeal to anti-migrant sentiment in the UK, she suggested.
Triggs said, “... we are in an environment in which populist governments will appeal to their rightwing, anti-migrant sentiment and this would presumably be part of that.”
Triggs also warned that the UK was introducing a discriminatory approach towards refugees, offering an uncapped scheme for asylum seekers from Ukraine and a “draconian” system for refugees from other countries.
“At the political level, we are seeing levels of discrimination,” Triggs said. “We are deeply concerned that the processes appear to be discriminatory. One of the fundamental principles of international law is non-discrimination on the grounds of race or ethnicity or nationality.”
Rwanda’s population density is almost double that of Britain’s. It is a country almost twice as crowded as ours. Yet per capita it already hosts five times as many refugees as the UK. As well as hosting Congolese and Burundian refugees, Rwanda has recently offered itself as a host country for the emergency evacuation of refugees trapped in dire conditions in Libya. Rwanda is among the world’s 25 poorest countries. The UK is among the world’s 10 richest countries.
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