Sunak only has himself to blame for the Rwanda ruling

It is seven years since the British public voted by a slim majority to leave the European Union. The idea was to ‘take back control’ by retrieving powers of sovereignty that had been given to Brussels. But there was another part of the equation that was less talked about: the power over law that had been given to the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. When the Rwanda scheme was thwarted last year, some argued it was time to pull out of the ECHR.

It’s hard to blame Strasbourg now that the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has just thwarted the Rwanda plan. The court’s verdict is a humiliation for Rishi Sunak, who promised to ‘stop the boats’ and to succeed where Boris Johnson had failed. Instead, he has ended up stuck in a legal quagmire that was created in London, not Europe. It is now clear that both Sunak and Boris Johnson made promises that they were legally unable to keep. Both gambled. Both lost.

The policy, which was drawn up under Johnson and taken up by Sunak, has been caught up in a mess of conflicting laws, a mess still not cleared up after 13 years of Conservative home secretaries and justice secretaries. The Rwanda scheme was the main policy for ‘stopping’ boat arrivals. The Supreme Court judges don’t rule out deportation altogether: they just say that Rwanda isn’t safe, because there’s a risk of the authorities in Kigali re-deporting asylum seekers to the country they originally fled from. They cite not only the European Convention on Human Rights but also the 1951 UN Convention on refugees and other treaties and conventions.

It’s hard not to sympathise with those who have risked their lives to come to Britain and start again at the very bottom, often at the mercy of human traffickers who demand labour (in agricultural or domestic service, nail bars or sweatshops) in exchange for their passage.