‘Rwanda deal’ made possible by legislating lies into reality
To take control of a debate it could not win in court, the ruling party has turned its argument into law.
When its new law came into force this week, Britain’s Home Office released a video of officers aggressively rounding up asylum-seekers and locking them up. According to local media reports, border force officials are now summarily detaining asylum seekers when they come in for routine case appointments. To make all this possible, the UK’s ruling Conservative Party had to go full Orwell.
In his novel 1984, George Orwell modelled a dystopian society on the Soviet Union – a country where the state decided what counted as truth, regardless of the facts. He probably didn’t imagine that his own government, in 2024, would also get into the business of legislating reality.
Last week, Britain’s Parliament passed the Safety of Rwanda Act. This proclaimed – against all evidence and arguments to the contrary – that “the Republic of Rwanda is a safe country” for the purposes of migration. It also ordered immigration officers and courts to “conclusively treat the Republic of Rwanda as a safe country” – regardless of the facts.
This extraordinary move to write its preferred reality into law, came after the Supreme Court ruled last year that Rwanda is not a safe country for asylum seekers and refugees, finding “serious and systemic defects’’ in how it handles asylum seekers. The UN Refugee Agency says that under a similar deal with Israel, Rwanda clandestinely sent some of the asylum seekers back to Uganda, their country of origin, where they risked persecution.
Frustrated in the courts, but intent on deporting asylum seekers to evade its responsibilities under international refugee law, the British government whipped its ruling party MPs into legislating a new reality into place.