Outsourcing Refugee Protection

This is the transcript of a talk given at a EuroMed Human Rights Watch event on offshoring in May 2022. 

In April this year the UK’s Home Office announced a new deal with Rwanda. At the same time, parliament passed new legislation which represents the governments flagship post Brexit immigration and asylum policy. The deal with Rwanda means that people who arrive in the UK off their own back, people who are seeking asylum, will have their claims for asylum categorised as inadmissible in the UK and they will be detained and then deported to Rwanda. But the new legislation also allows for the transfer to another country of someone who has lodged an asylum claim in the UK. So they don’t even need to be declared inadmissible to be transferred to Rwanda.

Once in Rwanda people’s applications will be recategorized as admissible and their applications for asylum in Rwanda will be processed there, as though they had originally travelled to Rwanda to claim asylum. In Rwanda, deportees will be accommodated but not detained. There is nothing more specific in the agreement for example in terms of access to healthcare, financial support, rights to work, or other services. 

The plan is meant to be a response to small boat Channel crossings. People cross the English Channel from France to the UK in small boats because there are almost no safe or legal routes to claim asylum in the UK. The only routes that there are, are a tiny number of resettlement places which work on a kind of lottery basis for people living in situations of protracted displacement around the world. 98% of people who cross the Channel in small boats apply for asylum. And we should note that already some are deemed inadmissible because they were involved in steering the boat they arrived on so they are arrested for smuggling. So we shouldn’t take that 2% as an indication that there is a chunk who don’t intend to apply for asylum. And in spite of the UKs highly restrictive asylum system which is designed to refuse as many people as possible, the majority of these cases are granted. 89% of Iranians, 97% of Eritreans, and 99% of Syrians are granted asylum.

The aim of the new plan is to punish people today, in order to deter imagined future people from even making the journey. But research around the world over several decades has failed to find any evidence that harsh measures such as offshoring succeed in having a deterrent effect. And the top civil servant in the Home Office expressed this fact to the Home Secretary this year in an open letter. A second aim stated in the notes on the legislation is to ‘manage the UKs asylum intake’, which I think is a reference to the administrative mess and long delays in UK asylum processing. This is obviously an administrative issue but the solution chosen seems to be to leave the system as it is, and simply remove most of the people that it is meant to deal with.

There have been concerns raised around sending people to Rwanda. Rwanda has a history of human rights violations, including towards asylum seekers. In 2013 Israel did a deal with Rwanda in which Eritrean and Sudanese refugees were given the choice of indefinite detention in Israel or deportation to Rwanda.  Research interviews with people who were deported to Rwanda as part of this plan doesn’t make it look like a great success. Upon landing in Rwanda the travel document produced by Israel, the only identity document in their possession, was taken away. None of them were given the opportunity to apply for asylum. Lacking identity documents and exposed to robberies and threats they were forced to embark on dangerous journeys. None, therefore stayed in Rwanda. These journeys included passing through South Sudan, Sudan and Libya in search of protection. 

I wanted to note this context, which I think is concerning, but I don’t really want to comment too much on Rwanda here as I am not familiar with the country. But what I do know about and want to talk about in the rest of my time is the kinds of logics which make a plan like this thinkable, from the UK side. 

We know that they know that the deterrent effect is unevidenced and doubtful. We know that they know that deporting people to a country far away will not ultimately save lives. We know that they know that it isn’t reasonable to use human rights violating deportations to solve administrative problems in the asylum system. We know they are aware of the danger they may be placing people in by deporting them to Rwanda. We know they will be aware of the huge and spiralling costs likely to be incurred in this plan. And I’m not going to pretend that they don’t know these things by giving you lots of evidence on deterrent effects and such like. The plan is obviously not a sustainable response to refugee migration. So we needn’t pretend that this plan is based on pragmatic and practical logics or a genuine desire to sustainably manage the reality of migration for asylum. And we just need to point out the ways in which they may have made a mistake… 

The moment that we are in represents the next step in the mainstreaming of the far right. And what that looks like is the normalising and legitimating of authoritarian and illiberal practices. While we might point out that these proposals seem to violate international law in various ways. And we might point out that the UK was one of the founding signatories of the UN human rights conventions, one of the founding signatories of the European Convention on Human Rights. They ratified the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol. We need to openly discuss the fact that the ruling Conservative party have been arguing for Britain to abolish the Human Rights Act which transposes the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law for years. And they are edging closer and closer to doing that within this parliament. 

I have shown in my research that the British Empire was hostile to including colonised peoples in human and refugee rights at their inception. They imagined a hierarchy of humanity, where only some humans are fully ready for human rights. Where some lives are worth more than others. And it was at the point at which people from formerly colonised countries began to apply for asylum in Britain, and Europe more broadly, that the right to asylum began to be curtailed. I see this new plan not as unexpected or exceptional, but part of that logic of differential humanity. We have to recognise that this logic of differential humanity didn’t come from nowhere, it was forged in nearly 500 years of colonialism.

And the offshore seems to be imagined today as a kind of colonial space: an invisible space, elsewhere, out of sight, somewhere in which normal rules don’t count, where undesirable people can be placed or pushed away. Over the past couple of years there have been relentless calls in Britain for people seeking asylum to be put elsewhere, on an island or foreign territory, just as convicts were sent to Australia historically. And there’s a palpable sense of frustration that this isn’t already being done, a sense that Britain owns the world and why can’t we put unwanted people where we like?

For example, a member of the Home Affairs Select Committee asked a senior civil servant in a meeting about Channel crossings last year:

‘At the very least, why do we not have a civilised version of what Australia does, which is to house and look after these people remotely, until such time as they can establish that they have a genuine asylum claim?’ 

The compulsion ‘to house and look after these people remotely’, was complemented during the select committee meetings by the suggestion: ‘shouldn’t civilised countries [like the UK] be really supporting governments such as those in Lebanon and Turkey [or, we now know, Rwanda] to provide civilised environments for people?’. There are constant references to civilisation in UK discussions around offshoring.

Within the responses to Channel crossings, then, we see what Paul Gilroy calls the ‘lingering but usually unspoken colonial relationships and imperial fantasies’. But as we’ve found out, these aren’t just fantasies, they also mimic colonial practices of encampment, expulsion, quarantine, and racial segregation. Those territories within the British Empire but outside of the metropolitan space of the UK were treated as spaces of exception in much the same way. The offshore was both somewhere that undesirable populations could be sent or kept, and a space in which normal rules, laws and codes of behaviour didn’t necessarily apply. 

As Achille Mbembe articulates in his work on necropolitics: ‘colonies are the location par excellence where the controls and guarantees of judicial order can be suspended – the zone where the violence of the state of exception is deemed to operate in the service of “civilization.”’ Through offshoring, new territories can either be created on floating vessels, or existing territories bought through development funds. All of these spaces become ‘historically emptied places’; that is, both discursively untethered from the colonial logics that inform their creation, and the connected histories which inspire them. The offshore turns legal rights into ambiguous and indefinite forms of abandonment. I’m not saying that people will necessarily be abandoned by the Rwandan government, but they are being abandoned by the UK government.

As I said before, the moment that we are in represents the next step in the mainstreaming of far right discourse and practice. Every announcement from the government on its next dystopian and dehumanising proposal starts with the claim that the country has a long and proud history of welcoming refugees. And we are told a range of lies and half truths to explain why deporting people who are seeking asylum elsewhere, before we have looked at their claim, is absolutely fine. This kind of tactic is exactly what Dutch political scientist Marlies Glasius calls ‘authoritarian practices’. That is, ‘Patterns of action that sabotage accountability to people over whom a political actor exerts control, by means of secrecy, disinformation and disabling voice’. These authoritarian practices almost always go hand in hand with Illiberal practices, which are ‘patterned and organized infringements of individual autonomy and dignity’, including human rights violations. 

I know that people will ask about resistance, and I am really bad for focussing too much on the evils committed by the state and not enough on resistance. But wherever you find injustice you find resistance. People resist by continuing to move, and there are already legal challenges, advocacy, solidarity, direct action, and petitions.  The UK government will criminalise resistance wherever possible, as it has criminalised movement. But I think that at some point in the future the policy will be overturned, and history teaches us that that will be as a result of the actions of those who resist. So there are warnings from history, but also hope, and that’s the thought I will leave you with.