Sunak defends his immigration law before Parliament

First modification: 03/08/2023 – 22:02Last modification: 03/08/2023 – 22:05

This Wednesday, March 8, there was a special question session in the British Parliament. The reason: the new immigration law proposed on Tuesday by the conservative government led by Rishi Sunak. The labor party, leader of the opposition, assures that it will be a new failure and Sunak has defended his proposal in the chamber.

With it, migrants who arrive irregularly in the United Kingdom, especially by boat through the English Channel, will be expelled in a matter of weeks to third countries that the Executive considers safe, such as Rwanda.

Under this new rule, migrants will also be denied the right to asylum. In the year 2022, a total of 45,000 people arrived in the UK on small boats, a record number.

Sunak acknowledges that the increase in this type of migration and the request for asylum is part of a global problem and ensures that with the new law, it only seeks that immigrants enter the United Kingdom in a “fair and legal” manner.

The priority of “people”

Faced with criticism from Labour, the prime minister stated that migration is not only the government’s priority, but “the people’s”.

“He’s just another left-wing lawyer standing in our way,” he snapped at Labor leader Keir Starmer.

“His position on this is clear, in his words he wanted to scrap the Rwanda deal, voted against measures to deport criminal foreigners and even argued against deportation flights,” he added.

For Starmer, the conservative promise to end this migration is nothing more than “empty rhetoric.”

“In the last decade they have introduced five immigration plans, which have been one failure after another, and everything is only getting worse. People are tired of harsh words and inappropriate actions,” he said while defending himself against the accusation of wanting borders open. It is the ‘Tories’ who “have lost control of immigration,” said the politician.

The Minister of the Interior, Suella Braverman, also faced criticism from various sectors and assured that they are not breaking the law with this rule. For Braverman, the Government complies with its “international obligations, for example the Refugee Convention, the European Convention on Human Rights and other conventions to which we are subject.”

He hides behind the fact that there are “people who are dying trying to get here” and assured that these migrants “are breaking our laws, they are abusing the generosity of the British and now we have to ensure that they are deterred from doing so.”

The UN warns of violation of international law

Organisms critical of the measure include the United Nations. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, believes that “it would contravene the UK’s obligations under international and refugee law.”

For Türk, the norm “also raises specific doubts in terms of human rights, such as the violation of the right to an individual assessment of each case and the prohibition of collective expulsions and arbitrary detention of immigrants.”

The expert recalled that any person who is forced to leave their country to seek safety abroad “has the right to have their human rights fully respected, regardless of their immigration status.”

The representative for the United Kingdom of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Vicky Tennant, also expressed concern about this movement by the United Kingdom.

“It is a clear violation of the Refugee Convention,” he said in statements published by the British channel ‘BBC’.

With EFE and Reuters