Europe is watching UK’s election battle over deporting migrants to Rwanda

LONDON — Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda asylum policy has repeatedly been declared illegal by U.K. judges, is yet to send any migrants to Rwanda, and has so far failed to rescue the British prime minister from the verge of electoral oblivion.

That hasn’t put off some European leaders, who increasingly like what they see.

The day before Sunak called the snap election that will decide his political fate, the PM was in Austria being lauded as an asylum “pioneer” by the country’s conservative chancellor Karl Nehammer — who said he’d been inspired to “put asylum proceedings in safe third countries on the European Union’s agenda too.”

The U.K. leader has put the Rwanda plan at the top of his campaign in a bid to prevent Tory voters jumping to the right-wing Reform U.K. party founded by Brexit godfather Nigel Farage — at the same time setting up a relatively rare point of policy difference with the main opposition Labour Party.

Nehammer is just the latest convert to a plan which would see people seeking asylum in Britain flown to central Africa for resettlement without having their cases heard.

Other fans include Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, who last year raised eyebrows by suggesting it was “racist” to question whether Rwanda was a safe country for Britain to send migrants.

Earlier this month, she organized a letter backed by 19 EU member countries asking the European Commission to explore new powers to process asylum applications outside EU territory — with the backing of governments including Denmark, the Netherlands and the three Baltic states.

Similar ideas are also gaining traction in Brussels. The manifesto of the dominant center-right European People’s Party (EPP) — likely to come top in next month’s European elections and expected to govern with support from Europe’s right wing — pledges to send asylum seekers to “safe third countries,” potentially permanently. The echos of the U.K.’s policy are clear.

Inhumane and undignified

It’s quite a turnaround: when the U.K. government first announced its policy in 2022 the EU’s Migration Commissioner Ylva Johansson wasted no time in declaring that “sending asylum seekers more than 6,000 km away and outsourcing asylum processes is not a humane and dignified migration policy.”

This week on his visit to see Nehammer, Sunak boasted to reporters that it was “increasingly clear that many other countries now agree” with his approach.

“The U.K. conversation has clearly had an impact in Europe,” Susan Fratzke, senior policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute told POLITICO. “It’s given some cover for European policymakers to discuss these things as real possibilities because it’s no longer a theoretical abstract.”

The U.K. government argues its policy would act as a deterrent to those thinking of traveling to Britain to claim asylum — an argument it has sometimes struggled to square with its insistence that Rwanda is a humane place to relocate someone against their will.

Rishi Sunak has put the Rwanda plan at the top of his campaign. | Pool photo by Toby Melville via Getty Images

Many European leaders remain unconvinced.

France’s Emmanuel Macron is perhaps the most high profile skeptic, arguing just last month that the model of sending arrivals away for processing was “a betrayal of our values” that would “lead us down the path of new dependencies on third countries”.

But even some initial skeptics are wavering. In November Germany’s social democratic Chancellor Olaf Scholz pledged that his government would “examine” whether Germany could begin processing asylum applications in third countries.

Reportedly strong-armed into the idea by regional leaders concerned about the threat from the far-right AfD, Scholz struck a skeptical tone, telling reporters that “there are also a whole series of legal questions” that would need to be resolved.

A safe haven?

This is arguably an understatement. The U.K. Supreme Court unanimously ruled last year that Sunak’s version of the policy breached multiple domestic laws — and also international covenants including the European Convention on Human Rights, the UN Refugee Convention, the UN Convention against Torture, and the UN International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

These all protect against the risk of “refoulement” — a key principle of the international asylum system which guards against the prospect of legitimate refugees being sent back to the danger they are fleeing.

Sunak has now seemingly got the policy back on track by passing an act of parliament to effectively define Rwanda as a safe country regardless of any evidence to the contrary— a move which the Council of Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner Michael O’Flaherty warned last month “raises major issues” about the rule of law in the U.K. Still, no flights to Rwanda have yet taken off, and the prime minister admitted Thursday none would until after the U.K. general election on July 4 at the earliest.

They may never take off at all: the opposition Labour Party, currently enjoying a commanding 20 plus point poll lead six weeks out from the election, has said it will scrap the policy, describing it as an ineffective gimmick.

Irina von Wiese, president of the European Centre for Populism Studies and a former liberal MEP, told POLITICO: “It is very likely that the first flight will be stopped again. So the U.K. is not going to look like a great other country to follow unless EU countries are also prepared to threaten the European Convention on Human Rights.”

The European Commission’s current public position on the U.K. policy is, in the words of one EU official asked by POLITICO to interpret it, “cryptic”. When Sunak’s latest legal fix passed last month, a spokesperson simply said: “We take note of the adoption of the Safety of Rwanda Bill. We call on the U.K. to respect its international commitments and ensure effective access to asylum procedures.”

Yet while leaders like Nehammer and Meloni are happy to talk up Sunak’s Rwanda plan, they aren’t necessarily pursuing exact carbon copies. There remains a distinction between the U.K’s approach of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda permanently without recourse, and what even the most interested EU leaders say they are considering.

A different approach

Meloni’s recent returns agreement with Albania, for example, would see asylum seekers have their cases processed in the Balkan country, but with successful applicants ultimately able to go and live in Italy. Nehammer, while full of praise for Sunak’s approach, is eyeing a scheme based on a similar model to that of Italy. This was also the approach being looked at in Denmark —although there it is currently on ice following a change in government.

Giorgia Meloni’s recent returns agreement with Albania would see asylum seekers have their cases processed in the Balkan country, but with successful applicants ultimately able to go and live in Italy. | Tiziana Fabi/AFP via Getty Images

“The options that are under consideration in Europe, and I think the discussions around what this could look like if it were to be done in Europe, look different than the U.K. Rwanda model,” Fratzke said, noting there was more willingness on the continent to work “within the parameters of both EU law and international law.” Unlike most EU proposals, the U.K. policy does not offshore the processing of asylum applications, but instead relocates arrivals to another country without considering their cases.

The idea of processing asylum applications outside the EU isn’t a particularly novel one: in 2018 the Juncker commission proposed a network of euphemistically-named “regional disembarkation platforms” where asylum seekers could have their claims processed rather than making the dangerous crossing over the Mediterranean.

Even if they don’t end up following quite the same model as the U.K., talking up Sunak’s Rwanda policy seems to give EU leaders wanting to move in this direction the political space to put offshore processing on the agenda again in Brussels.

Yet the challenges remain: “disembarkation platforms” did not happen last time in part because of practical issues. As well as legal complexities in international and EU asylum law, few third party countries want to host migrants, and even fewer of those that do are considered safe.

Britain has attempted to square that circle in two ways: the first is the legislation defining Rwanda as safe regardless of the evidence. The second is a huge amount of money: the U.K. government’s own costings estimate the would policy to cost £1.8 million per asylum seeker for the first 300 people deported. Whether EU governments are prepared to embrace either of these workarounds remains to be seen.