On Monday, over 180 UK health professionals and representatives from leading medical bodies sent a letter to Tory prime minister Rishi Sunak denouncing the plans to transport asylum seekers to Rwanda, warning it will cause ‘catastrophic mental and physical harm’ to people seeking sanctuary.
The letter, signed by the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecologists amongst others, said:
‘Subjecting people seeking sanctuary in the UK, many of whom have mental health conditions and have histories of torture, trafficking and trauma, to such an inhumane process is a matter of significant concern for the medical community.’
This letter coincided with the opening of a hearing by the Court of Appeal against a High Court ruling in December that the Tory plan to dump refugees and asylum seekers in Rwanda, with no right of appeal and no right of return, was lawful.
The High Court, in making this decision to give the green light to the Tories to implement their Rwanda deportation plan, admitted: ‘There is no evidence that during its negotiations with the Rwandan government, the United Kingdom sought to investigate either the terms of the Rwanda/Israel agreement or the way it had worked in practice.’
This failure to investigate what had happened to Israeli asylum seekers sent to Rwanda, the High Court decided, was not an ‘error of law’ and could be ignored.
The Rwanda/Israel agreement, which ran from 2013 to 2018, was almost identical to that the Tories have struck. No wonder they didn’t want to publicly investigate how it worked in practice.
Lawyers seeking to overturn the High Court ruling told the Court of Appeal that asylum seekers sent by the Israeli government were detained without the opportunity of claiming asylum due to ‘security concerns’ – they were then arrested for lack of documentation.
Asylum seekers simply disappeared while many were almost immediately picked up by smuggling gangs who extorted money from them to carry them over the border to Uganda and then on back to the war zones many had already fled in the Middle East.
An unknown number died while fleeing ‘safe’ Rwanda.
Out of the 4,000 asylum seekers Israel deported to Rwanda the UN Refugee Agency said it was only aware of nine people who remained in the country, the fate of the thousands of men, women and children unaccounted for is unknown.
The Israeli government was forced to close down the deportation scheme following a massive public outcry. This is no deterrent to a Tory government determined to portray refugees and asylum seekers as the enemy to be dumped in a hell hole in Rwanda or incarcerated on a prison boat.
Today in parliament, the Tories will be pushing through the ‘Illegal Migrations’ Bill which aims to stop anyone arriving the UK ‘illegally’ from claiming asylum.
Children and pregnant women, along with men, will be arrested and held in prison camps awaiting a one-way ticket to Rwanda.
The attempt by the Tories to portray asylum seekers as the enemy will not wash with the working class.
Workers see clearly that the real enemy is at home and it is this Tory government and a barbaric capitalist system that can only survive through wars against the people of the world and a war against the working class at home to impose the crisis of a bankrupt capitalist system on the backs of workers.
While the Tories are using the courts to criminalise refugees, they are preparing anti-union laws that will ban the right to strike in the UK.
In fact, we are now all in the same trench and the time has come to unite the entire working class by forcing the TUC to call a general strike to bring down the Tories and bring in a workers’ government that will expropriate the bosses and bankers and welcome every worker from any country to join in building a socialist society.
This is the only way forward for workers and the people of the world – to put an end to capitalism with the victory of the world socialist revolution.