by Suella Braverman is set to visit Rwanda as Britain’s £140million deal to send asylum seekers to the country continues to face legal challenges.
The home secretary is to reaffirm her commitment to the agreement reached by her predecessor Priti Patel in April 2022, which has so far fallen short of the government’s goal of preventing small boat crossings.
The Independent understands that the publicly funded visit is her first visit to the country since becoming MP, but Ms Braverman previously traveled to Rwanda on a Conservative Party project supported by the country’s President Paul Kagame.
“Rwanda is a dynamic country with a thriving economy,” she told parliament on Monday. “I have enjoyed visiting it myself twice and I look forward to visiting again.”
The Minister of the Interior will leave for Kigali on Friday evening, accompanied by representatives of the media, e.g GB News, The Daily Mail And The Daily Telegraph. The BBCThe Independent, The Guardian, Daily Mirror And I Newspapers were not invited.
Ms. Braverman will meet senior Rwandan politicians and visit facilities set up under the Migration and Economic Development Partnership, which is a key part of the new law on illegal migration.
Rishi Sunak had a phone call with Mr Kagame on the day the bill was announced. Downing Street said they were “committed to continue working together to ensure this important partnership is successfully implemented”.
The proposed law aims to allow the government to detain and deport asylum seekers arriving in small boats without examining their applications, in what the UN refugee agency calls an “asylum ban”.
Legal challenges are expected and practical questions are piling up about where people can be sent when the only deals are with Albania and Rwanda.
Ms Braverman told MPs this week: “Our partnership with Rwanda is unlimited. We are ready to operationalize it at scale as soon as legally possible.”
No asylum seekers have yet been sent to Kigali, and several people from countries including Iran, Iraq and Syria are questioning plans to take them there.
Next month, judges at the Court of Appeal will consider arguments about the “adequacy of Rwanda’s asylum system” and whether the government erred in declaring it a safe country for renditions.
The Supreme Court had previously heard that Rwanda was “excluded” from a 2021 asylum deal over politically motivated human rights abuses including torture, murder and kidnapping.
But it was put back on the list of potential countries after Boris Johnson and Priti Patel showed “particular interest”.
The program remains suspended while litigation continues, and while the Supreme Court found the policy legal as a whole in December, all individual removal decisions under consideration were overturned.
In an attempted flight last June, asylum seekers were forcibly carried onto a plane and detained, some self-harming and threatening to kill themselves in desperate scenes before the flight was canceled following injunctions from the European Court of Human Rights.
An initial £120m was paid to Rwanda in ‘development finance’ when the agreement was signed, with a further £20m handed over later last year for facility costs.
The Rwandan government has not ruled out asking for further payments on top of at least three years’ funding for each “relocated person”.
Ms Braverman was a lawyer and Conservative Party election candidate on her previous visits to Rwanda in 2008 and 2010 and has not made the work public since her election to Parliament in 2015.
She pointed out at the time that the country did not have a “properly functioning legal system” but has since told MEPs that Rwanda is a “fundamentally safe country” suitable to receive UK asylum seekers.
Writing under her maiden name, Suella Fernandes, in 2011, Ms Braverman said she was on a team of volunteer attorneys who “teached judges, government attorneys, community justice attorneys and law students about advocacy, drafting law, negotiation and substantive law.”
She was traveling with Project Umubano, described on its now-defunct website as “the Conservative Party’s social action project in Rwanda and Sierra Leone.”
It is not clear if Ms Braverman met the Rwandan President, although Mr Kagame reportedly attended some events and told a local newspaper Project Umubano was “meaningful and will help the people of Britain better understand Rwanda”.
Ms. Braverman also co-founded, which she later left, a charity called the Africa Justice Foundation, which worked with Kigali and trained lawyers who now work in the Rwanda Ministry of Justice.
