ROME — Britain’s Home Secretary on Tuesday hailed the migrant deportation deal between Britain and Rwanda as a “new and creative” deterrent to an old and growing problem. But he said he accepted serious criticism from the UN refugee agency for violating international law.
Home Secretary James Cleverly visited Italy, ground zero of Europe’s migration debate, hours after the UK Parliament passed legislation that would allow the government to deport some people who enter Britain illegally to Rwanda.
The deal, which will see Britain pay Rwanda to process migrants, aims to deter people from crossing the English Channel from France. It is similar in some basic ways to Italy’s controversial pact to outsource the processing of asylum seekers to Italian-run centers in Albania.
Human rights groups have said both agreements, forged by conservative governments amid anti-immigrant sentiment among voters, violate migrants’ rights enshrined in international refugee conventions.
On Tuesday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said the UK-Rwanda deal “is not compatible with international refugee law” because it uses an asylum model “that undermines global solidarity and the system.” established international refugee protection system.
He smartly defended the agreement as a necessary response to a problem that has surpassed the international institutional way of processing immigrants. He said Britain will not tolerate people smugglers determining who reaches British soil.
“Mass smuggling migration has changed (and) I think it requires us to be constantly innovating,” he said at a meeting at the Institute of International Affairs, a Rome-based think tank.
He said he took UNHCR’s criticism seriously and said Britain was a law-abiding country.
“Of course we will respect the UN enormously,” he said when asked about criticism of the UNHCR. “We take it very, very seriously. It doesn’t mean we always agree with your assessment. But, of course, we will look into it.”
Cleverly visited the headquarters of the Italian coast guard on Tuesday and on Wednesday he will visit the Sicilian island of Lampedusa, where tens of thousands of migrants have arrived after crossing the Mediterranean Sea on boats from North Africa.
Lampedusa is closer to Africa than the Italian mainland and is usually the destination of choice for immigrants, whose numbers reached 157,652 new arrivals in Italy last year.
Arrival figures in Italy so far this year are actually very low, presumably thanks to Italy’s EU-backed deal with Tunisia to curb departures. As of Tuesday, 16,090 migrants had arrived by sea in Italy so far this year, compared to 36,324 in the same period last year.
In fact, Spain has surpassed Italy so far this year in terms of migrant arrivals by sea, with 16,621 arrivals this year as of April 15, the latest date available.
In Britain, the numbers pale in comparison to those in the southern Mediterranean, even during peak periods: in 2022, the number of people arriving in Britain from across the Channel reached 45,774, although last year the figure was reduced to 29,437.