Scrap the Rwanda Plan

LETTER PUBLISHED IN THE CAMDEN NEW JOURNAL, 2 MAY 2024

On Monday 29 April, the UK government announced it was rounding up immigrants when they attend their regular signing on appointments to detain them prior to deporting them to Rwanda*.

As a volunteer with Payday based at the Crossroads Women’s Centre in Kentish Town, I joined members of Action Against Detention & Deportation, at one of the signing on Centres to protest and give out leaflets telling people about their rights.  Everyone we spoke to was glad for the information about how to resist this hatred scheme.

The Rwanda Plan is far from a done deal. Immigrant people and asylum seekers, including from the All African Women’s Group, based at our Centre, will continue to resist their own deportation and spearhead campaigns to stop this cruel Plan. They need and deserve support. If the government can get away with breaching international law, overriding the courts and undermining the Refugee Convention and the Human Rights Act, so that people escaping persecution, starvation, torture and war are turned away at the border, then that sets a new low standard of brutality that we will all suffer from.

*The Rwanda Plan is a scheme to deport newly arrived migrants to Rwanda for their claim to be processed. Even if migrants get asylum status, they would stay in Rwanda, a very poor country at war with the Democratic Republic of Congo. There is a wide opposition to this Plan which violates international law by ignoring UK legal international obligations.