1st December 2023
Discussing yesterday’s post with a long-suffering friend, the following thought came to mind.
In the Rwanda judgment, the Supreme Court goes into detail as to the work needed on the ground to make the removals policy robust and practical; and, in turn, the government is seeking to use parliament to simply declare a policy legal instead of illegal.
This seems quite the role-reversal: the court setting out what needs to be done as a matter of policy, instead of the executive and the legislature, and the executive threatening to use the legislature to decide whether something is lawful.
Strange, if you think about it.
****
Comments Policy
This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.
Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated and comments will not be published if irksome, or if they risk derailing the discussion.
More on the comments policy is here.
I remember a New York federal trial court once doing something similar. It ruled that the sacking of a particularly obnoxious professor at a public university violated the First Amendment. It also laid out, in quite a bit of detail, how the university could fire the professor consistently with the evidence and the First Amendment, if it chose to try so again. The university and professor settled soon after, favorably to the university.
The government seems quite keen to press ahead with this Rwanda notion. Must be important to them – possibly for electoral reasons. But here I see a difficulty. Perfectly possible to make out the legal roadblocks have been fixed, perfectly possible to make out we have a bunch of nice kindly lawyers in country to look after the rights of those shipped out there.
But actually getting people on a plane and shipped out is another thing entirely and a bit risky – electoral optics wise. For this reason I smell an early election, the legal niceties can be spun out until mid 2024 but not much later. If they leave it much later the numbers of boat people will start going up again as the winter recedes. Not so good electoral optics wise.
Alternatively Cleverly could go for an early shipment and enjoy the legal fuss that would go with it. Whichever way the fuss went it makes a nice diversion and could feed into an election campaign.
Make no mistake that if anyone does get flown out to Rwanda then even it was illegal to deport them that person is never coming back.
The whole plan sotto voce is based on sending planeloads out knowing its illegal but once far away in Africa the UKG knows that any court order will be de facto ignored/frustrated in the myriads of ways governments have at their disposal and that the Tory voters will applaud.
I’ll even stick my neck out and say that a future Labour government won’t bring them back
Ironic isn’t it? Especially now everyone’s favourite pantomime villain, Dominic Cummings, revealed in a Dec 3 tweet that the Rwanda policy was only ever meant as a diversion from the problem of small boat arrivals, not a realistic way to prevent.
If this new law ends up before the courts it’ll be very interesting to see the response.
How does a court deal with a legal instruction to ignore facts?
Am I right in thinking that the Rwanda Bill is saying that Rwanda will follow international law while allowing the UK to avoid it?!