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Rishi Sunak has vowed to introduce emergency legislation and defy European judges as he tries to rescue his stricken policy of removing asylum seekers to Rwanda.
The UK Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Wednesday that the government’s policy was unlawful, with opposition Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer saying the ruling had “blown up” Sunak’s Rwanda policy.
But Sunak said at a Downing Street press conference he still intended to put asylum seekers on planes to the African nation “in the spring next year” and that he would introduce emergency legislation to make it happen.
The UK prime minister said a new treaty would be agreed with Rwanda to address concerns raised by the Supreme Court and then MPs would be asked to approve legislation to endorse the treaty.
“This will enable parliament to confirm that, with our new treaty, Rwanda is safe,” he said.
Earlier Lord Robert Reed, president of the Supreme Court, said asylum seekers sent to Rwanda would be at real risk of being repatriated to their countries of origin without proper consideration of their claims.
The Supreme Court said in its Wednesday judgment: “There are substantial grounds for believing that the removal of the claimants to Rwanda would expose them to a real risk of ill-treatment by reason of refoulement.”
Refoulement is the forced return of asylum seekers to their home countries when they are likely to face persecution.
The decision infuriated Conservative MPs and left Sunak’s migration policy in tatters. One minister told the Financial Times: “There is no chance anyone will be on a plane to Rwanda before the election.”
Sunak said a new treaty with Rwanda would state that people transferred from Britain would have protections against further removal from Rwanda.
“It will make clear that we will bring anyone back if ordered to do so by the court,” he said. However he admitted the Rwanda scheme could still face a legal challenge in Strasbourg.
Sunak used a Downing Street press conference to fire a warning shot at the European Court of Human Rights, saying: “We will not allow a foreign court to block these flights.”
Sir David Normington, former permanent secretary at the Home Office, told the FT that it was “not enough for the government to declare somewhere is safe.
“The prime minister said he is going to change the law. But I don’t see how they can get over the basic problem: that Rwanda has been judged by the Supreme Court to be unsafe,” he said.
Sir Keir Starmer, the opposition Labour leader, said the ruling meant “the central pillar of his government has crumbled beneath him”.
The Rwandan government said the ruling was “ultimately a decision for the UK’s judicial system”.
“We do take issue with the ruling that Rwanda is not a safe third country for asylum seekers and refugees, in terms of refoulement,” it added.
Sunak’s deal with Rwanda, which received an initial £120mn payment from the UK last year, has been a showpiece policy of successive Conservative governments and is a central part of the prime minister’s crackdown on irregular migration.
The Supreme Court’s decision leaves a hole in Sunak’s migration policy and will fuel demands by Conservative MPs for Britain to leave the European Convention on Human Rights.
Suella Braverman, who was sacked as home secretary by Sunak on Monday, said the government should legislate in order to block legal challenges under the ECHR and HRA.
Reed stressed in the judgment on Wednesday that the ECHR was not the only legal basis for the court’s decision, saying the UK was bound by other treaties, including the UN convention for refugees.
On the basis of evidence from the UN refugee agency, the court upheld an earlier decision by the court of appeal, which found real risks that asylum seekers sent to Rwanda could be removed to their countries of origin in a potential breach of the UN convention.
“The changes needed to eliminate the risk of refoulement may be delivered in future, but they have not been shown to be in place now,” Reed said.
Conservative MP Marcus Fysh highlighted on social media that 45 Tories had previously sought legislative changes that would have disapplied all international law that threatened to obstruct border policy.
Many Tory MPs, particularly those representing liberal-minded seats in southern England, oppose leaving the ECHR. The new home secretary James Cleverly and foreign secretary David Cameron are thought to be unlikely to support such a move.
Natalie Elphicke, Tory MP for Dover, said the decision on Rwanda meant “the policy is effectively at an end”. “No planes will be leaving and we now need to move forward,” she wrote on social media platform X.
But Tory deputy chair Lee Anderson said Sunak should ignore the ruling. “I think we should just get the planes in the air now and send them to Rwanda,” he told reporters.
Peter Walsh, senior researcher at the Migration Observatory at the University of Oxford, said Wednesday’s ruling had major implications for the government’s ability to enforce the Illegal Migration Act.
The act, passed in July but yet to come into full effect, bars anyone arriving in the UK without prior permission from claiming asylum and places a legal onus on the home secretary to detain and remove them. The policy relied on there being safe third countries to which migrants could be sent.
