New UK PM Kier Starmer to scrap Rwanda deportation plan

LONDON: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said on Saturday that he was "not prepared" to continue with the previous Conservative governement's policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda, Al Jazeera reported. "The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started. It's never been a deterrent," Starmer said in his first news conference on Saturday, after his Labour Party won a landslide in the general elections, Al Jazeera reported.

The previous government led by Rishi Sunak approved the contentious law in April, declaring Rwanda a safe third country, which bypassed an earlier UK Supreme Court ruling that said the scheme was unlawful on human rights grounds, Al Jazeera reported.

"I'm not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don't act as deterrents," he told reporters after a cabinet meeting, calling the plan a "problem that we are inheriting". Starmer said the Rwanda scheme was widely expected to fail. "Everyone has worked out, particularly the gangs that run this, that the chance of ever going to Rwanda was so slim--less than 1 per cent. The chances were of not going, not being processed, and staying here therefore in paid-for accommodation for a very, very long time," he said.

Agnes Callamard, secretary-general of Amnesty International, called on the new Labour government to follow through on its campaign promise to scrap the Rwanda pact. "Our asylum system must be made to focus on delivering as fairly and efficiently as possible the security and certainty to which every refugee is entitled, however they may arrive," Callamard wrote in a social media post.

The authorities started detaining asylum seekers in May. Sunak, who promised to stop migrants and asylum seekers arriving on small boats from mainland Europe, had pushed for the policy. Several activists and critics of Sunak's government raised concerns about the East African country's own human rights record and said asylum seekers faced the risk of being sent back to countries where they would be in danger.