Rwanda: the real stories behind the UK’s sadistic asylum scheme

This story is taken from the spring 2024 issue of Dazed. Pre-order a copy of the magazine here.

The Rwanda plan has proven to be one of the most singularly expensive, ineffective and inhumane asylum schemes in modern British history.

When the government announced its plans to remove asylum seekers to Rwanda for offshore processing on April 14, 2022, moral and legal challenges from across the UK swiftly followed. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby dubbed the scheme “the opposite of the nature of God”, while Lord Alf Dubs, who came to the UK on kindertransport, described it as “state-sponsored trafficking”. As Open Rights Group and Foxglove mounted a legal challenge regarding the sharing of personal data with
the Rwandan government, the Public and Commercial Services civil servants’ union worked with migrant right charities Detention Action and Care4Calais to post the matter for judicial review. Regardless, the Home Office pressed on and issued thousands of removal notices to asylum seekers.

In June 2022, the first removal flight to Rwanda was halted on the runway after the European Court of Human Rights provided interim relief, citing evidence that asylum seekers processed in Rwanda would not have access to fair and efficient procedures. As the government continued to face legal and operational challenges – in October 2022, the airline contracted to conduct the removals announced it had pulled out – public scrutiny of the plan’s true cost added fuel to arguments to scrap it altogether. Despite having already been paid £140m in development funding, the Rwandan government announced it would only have space for 200 asylum seekers, and, in any case, asylum seekers continued to cross the English Channel, suggesting that the scheme would not deter future asylum seekers either.

2022 ended with a fleeting moment of success for the Home Office, as the High Court ruled that the Rwanda plan was lawful. But the Court of Appeal overturned the High Court’s ruling in June 2023, on the basis that there was a real risk asylum seekers could be sent back to their country of origin. Though the government appealed, the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the Court of Appeal’s ruling in November 2023.

As it stands, the UK government has paid £240m to Rwanda, with a further payment of £50m expected in the 2024-25 financial year. Not a single asylum seeker has been removed to the central African nation, and Rwandan president Paul Kagame has warned that there are “limits” to how long the Rwanda plan can “drag on”. In a historic vote in January 2024, the House of Lords voted to delay ratification of a UK-Rwanda treaty until Rwanda could improve its asylum procedures – the first time that the Lords have voted against the ratification of a treaty.

In a 2013 column for The Telegraph, Boris Johnson introduced the term ‘dead cat’ to the British political vernacular. He defined ‘dead-catting’ – a term that six years later would become associated with his tenure as prime minister – as “throwing a dead cat on the dining room table”, to the effect that “everyone will shout ‘Jeez, mate, there’s a dead cat on the table!’” Johnson continued: ‘In other words, they will be talking about the dead cat – the thing you want them to talk about – and they will not be talking about the issue that has been causing you so much grief.”

Politicos and journalists have often returned to the ‘dead cat’ metaphor to describe the Rwanda plan. Keir Starmer’s initial reaction to the scheme was to describe it as a “desperate announcement” to distract from Johnson’s “own law-breaking” amidst Partygate. More recently, London mayor Sadiq Khan argued in a speech at the 2024 Fabian Society New Year Conference that “the government has put this dead cat on the table with this Rwanda policy. We’ve got to say no. The reason why the NHS has the problems it has is not because of asylum seekers and refugees. The reason why you can’t get the good jobs you want is not because of asylum seekers or refugees.”

“Every asylum seeker in the UK fears they may be next as it seems everyone is potentially eligible”

This analysis of the Rwanda plan does seem to hold weight. With the most important paper in Tory circles, The Telegraph, reporting that the party is “facing a 1997-style general election wipeout” at the polls, the government has a motive. It seems that the Tories are trying to coax their voters to the polls by arguing that Labour would, in former home secretary Suella Braverman’s words, make the UK a “dumping ground” for Europe’s migrants.

With each legal, operational and reputational challenge the UK government faces, the likelihood of an asylum seeker being sent to Rwanda becomes increasingly remote. Yet the plan does not only exist as a “fuck-you moodboard” designed to “[annoy] all the right people”, as a recent Guardian column argued. Profound damage has already been done. The threat of being sent to Rwanda hangs heavily over asylum seekers’ heads, as they spend hours engaged in Kremlinology of the Home Office, trying to decipher whether they might be next. Each letter, telephone call and news item is pored over, with friends and family sharing the minutiae of their asylum proceedings for auspicious or unhappy omens.

Haleemah*, an asylum seeker from Mauritius, was recently threatened with removal after, in her words, a solicitor “messed up her case” six years after she arrived in
the UK. “I sent our further submission with a new solicitor in October 2023,” she explains. “In December we were refused. Then my husband and I went to court with our three kids with another solicitor’s help. That day the Home Office didn’t come to the court. Many people told us that if the Home Office doesn’t come to the court in person then that means you’ll get [refugee] status. I remember the judge asked my barrister, ‘Oh, that little one, she’s just four and a half years?’ My friends also said that on this basis, I’d get status. But after a week we were refused, and we got a letter from the Family Returns Unit, saying they even wanted to speak with my children about removal.”

The panic is only fed by the arbitrary nature of the plan. The UK government has still not published guidance on the criteria by which asylum seekers may be sent to Rwanda, with charities such as Medical Justice describing the scheme as “random”. At times the scheme seems to contradict its own stated aims. After the government promised to support Afghans who served British interests in their “aspiration for a better life”, an Afghan intelligence analyst who supported coalition forces and crossed to the UK on a small boat due to extensive delays to his relocation to the UK was threatened with removal to Rwanda. Every asylum seeker in the UK fears they may be next, as it seems everyone is potentially eligible: in 2022, the Home Office was forced to apologise after it threatened to send a pregnant Eritrean rape survivor to Rwanda.

Haleemah has begun withdrawing into herself, as the constant chatter around refugee status and removals becomes too much. “I have a friend, she’s from Mauritius
as well,” she tells me. “She had an asylum interview but she kept postponing and then her husband said, ‘It’s time for you to go to the interview.’ Most of the questions they asked, she said, ‘I don’t know, I don’t remember.’ She went for her interview on December 18, and on January 3 she got her status. It’s quite biased, it’s just chance.” Haleemah points out that, despite her case being very similar to her friend’s, she has been waiting for years under constant threat of removal. “It’s stressful. When this lady from Mauritius talks to me, she tells me she has the right to work, and maybe she’ll get her papers because she pays tax. It makes me feel good for nothing.”

Waiting is “experiencing the effect of power”, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu famously wrote. While waiting for refugee status, the host state dictates to asylum seekers where they can live (in a hotel, hostel, barge, shelter, independent accommodation or, worse yet, in detention), what they spend their time doing (working, studying or made to pass the time before they have the right to do either), and whom they can live with (alone, with strangers or with family – if they are granted the right to family reunification). The Rwanda plan is the logical conclusion of the absolute power that governments have exercised on asylum seekers for years, by dictating not just how they can live in the UK, but how and where they should live, even 4,000 miles away from British shores.

The scheme has been presented to the British public as a strategy to reduce the asylum ‘backlog’ and the waiting game asylum seekers are caught in. But according to Jason Thomas-Fournillier, a Trinidadian writer who draws on his experience in the asylum procedure, the aims of the Rwanda plan are diametrically opposed to efficiency. “The £240m that was spent for Rwanda should have been put into more workers for vetting to ease the backlog, and secondly, to improve social housing and lodging for people seeking asylum,” he tells me. “There was no proper assessment of why people are crossing the English Channel from Calais and no attempt to have a robust relationship with France.” As the Refugee Council has pointed out, over half of the current asylum backlog consists of claims made after the introduction to parliament of the Illegal Migration Act in March 2023 that established the legal foundations for the Rwanda scheme: in the words of its Chief Policy Analyst, John Featonby, “the impact [of the legislation that has accompanied Rwanda] is to create a permanent backlog of people stuck in limbo”.

“My husband took the boat from France to come here. It was a very risky trip but they had refused everything. By the way, my husband is over 60. He doesn’t know how to swim. But he said, ‘I’m dying without all of you’”

The only way to find logic within the Rwanda plan, which inevitably draws resources away from asylum processing and clearing the backlog, is through the lens of deterrence. In this sense, the Rwanda plan is just as powerful if it comes to fruition or if it does not. This is firstly because, in the UK government’s estimation, it deters potential boatloads of asylum seekers from crossing the English Channel – despite evidence to the contrary. Secondly, the asylum backlog only stands to grow due to the Rwanda scheme, thus contributing to the government’s aims of making the UK as inhospitable to asylum seekers as possible. Tens of thousands of asylum claims have been put on pause as their removal to Rwanda is considered: only once their claim has been determined to be ‘admissible’ in the UK asylum system can it progress to an assessment of their claim to refugee status. In other words, the Rwanda scheme provides the government with endless legal loops that asylum seekers must first jump through before they receive refugee status. Rishi Sunak’s new year’s statement that “the legacy backlog [has been] clear[ed] as [the] plan to stop the boats delivers” is a masterpiece of oxymoron.

Hanan* has been waiting to regularise her and her family’s status in the UK for a decade since fleeing Egypt with her four children. After a decade of purgatory, she still lives in fear of removal to Rwanda. “When we came to the UK I immediately put in our asylum application and issued a family reunification claim to my husband who was in Denmark at the time,” she explained. “But the UK refused and said that we should all go to Denmark instead. But how can we go to Denmark when my four children go to school here? And why would we go there when we could be rejected there anyway?”

Hanan’s husband then crossed to France where he applied for family reunification afresh to the UK. Once again, the family was met with bad news. “We received a refusal from France on July 1, 2020,” Hanan explains. “We didn’t find another way for him to come and join us except taking the boat from France to come here. So it was a very risky trip for him but they had refused everything. By the way, my husband is over 60 years old. He doesn’t know how to swim; he’s scared of water. But he said, ‘I’m dying without all of you.’ So he arrived and spent nearly two years here before we received his refusal nearly two months ago. We’ve applied for the right of family life with our youngest child but we haven’t heard [back] for a year and a half.”

In the ten years since Hanan arrived in the UK with her four children, neither she, her husband or her four children have received refugee status. Their lives have consequently been on hold for a decade, and now they fear they are at risk of removal to Rwanda for offshore processing if they submit a further application for refugee status. “My two sons are very talented at football. They couldn’t carry on with that and join a team because they didn’t have a status here,” she says. “My children couldn’t join in on school trips because their passports are with the Home Office. We are in a big jail. We are not allowed to do anything. My sons are stuck at home with nothing.”

The situation has not improved as her children have grown older. “They don’t have the right to drive,” says Hanan. “They can’t even fall in love with anyone. First of all they are embarrassed because they are worried someone will say that they are falling in love just for visas. And anyway they cannot go to a registry office and be registered there for marriage. We’ve been arrested in our house – so, why don’t they put us in a jail? That would be better. We would not go out and we would not have a dream to do anything more than what we have. This country talks all the time about human rights, but I haven’t seen that.”

Hanan’s diagnosis of the UK’s disregard for asylum seekers touches at major faultlines in the very concept of human rights. In 1949, four years after the end of the second world war and a year after the landmark Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the UN General Assembly, Hannah Arendt, exiled from Germany along with scores of German Jews, reflected that human rights are meaningless without belonging to a political community. Without citizenship – what she termed “the right to have rights” – there would be no way to claim the most basic of rights such as the right to education, the right to work, or the right to an adequate standard of living.

Postmodern asylum systems have vindicated Arendt’s cynicism regarding human rights. The underlying logic of the Rwanda plan, and indeed the UK government’s whole approach to asylum, is that determining someone’s status precedes ensuring their human rights, which can be put off indefinitely until they are regularised. That is why a plan which would otherwise be termed as “join[ing] in with those who are trafficking by trafficking [asylum seekers] to Rwanda”, in the words of the bishop of Dover, has acquired a gloss of legality.

“Rwanda has served a shock to the British political system in its crude, undisguised cruelty. But we cannot say that we weren’t warned”

The administrative language around Rwanda also serves to legitimise a scheme that flies in the face of international law. The act of ripping an asylum seeker from their community to send them to Rwanda, a country with a dubious human rights record where the asylum seeker most likely does not speak the language or benefit from support networks, is rebranded as ‘removal’. Assessing whether an asylum seeker is allowed to stay in the UK or must be sent to Rwanda is described as ‘admissibility’. The term ‘asylum backlog’ reveals that the UK government identifies more as a victim of its long to-do list rather than as a victimiser of tens of thousands of asylum seekers caught in a decade-long limbo. The perpetual waiting in the name of status determination, removal notices, family reunification claims, endless refusals and appeals on all of the above allows governments to shirk legal responsibilities towards asylum seekers while maintaining the semblance of ‘law and order’.

While the government hides behind a smokescreen of ‘fair and proper procedures’, the image of asylum seekers has been indelibly harmed through the Rwanda plan. As Thomas-Fournillier points out, the endless waiting only serves to “depreciate asylum seekers’ value”. “Given that most of us are highly educated in our own countries,” he explained, “if you put us to use, that would change the narrative, and then people would see what we give to the UK. But the UK government doesn’t want to change that narrative. They want to set a narrative that we are ignorant and illiterate and want to take from the benefits system.”

Despite the deep ruptures it has created in Britain’s asylum-seeking community, the Rwanda plan is unlikely to bear fruit, either in sending asylum seekers for offshore processing, or in deterring others from crossing to the UK. “They think the policy will stop them from coming, but they will still come,” says Frank, a Ugandan medical student who recently received refugee status. “For instance, I didn’t know what was going on in the UK; I didn’t even know the policies. A friend of mine just told me that if I came here I would be safer. Even if I’d known about the Rwanda policy before I came, I would have come. It’s always a gamble; you don’t know what you’re going to find. Because these people are looking for safety.”

There are no winners in the Rwanda plan: only losers. The years that asylum seekers wait before receiving refugee status have become much longer and much more agony-filled. As they jump through hoops to establish that they are ineligible to be removed to Rwanda, they must be supported by the state, with no right to work until they gain refugee status. The UK loses out on taxes it could collect from asylum seekers and misses an opportunity to fill labour gaps. Britain’s reputation on the world stage as a modern democracy has taken a major hit.

Rwanda has served a shock to the British political system in its crude, undisguised cruelty – but we cannot say that we weren’t warned. The plan is the logical extension
of the UK government’s approach to asylum built over the last few decades. It is premised on two underlying assumptions. The first is that conditions must be as dreadful, both materially and psychologically, and procedures as lengthy as possible to dissuade as many asylum seekers as possible from coming. The second is that the UK government has absolute power over asylum seekers to dictate every last detail of their lives. A dead cat the Rwanda plan may be, but for those caught up in its cruel logic, it’s one whose repercussions are sadly all too real.