Legal challenges meant the first Rwanda flight was cancelled shortly before take-off in June 2022
By Dominic Casciani
Home and legal correspondent
One of the UK’s leading organisations helping victims of torture and trafficking is preparing legal action over the government’s Rwanda plan.
Asylum Aid said it has urgently asked the Home Office to rethink, saying the scheme will not protect abuse victims.
The Home Office declined to comment on legal challenges, but a spokesman said Rwanda was a safe country.
In a separate development, a court document disclosed on Friday suggests the first flight could be on 1 July.
The Home Office has begun detaining migrants in preparation for trying to send a flight in the summer.
Asylum Aid works with some of the most vulnerable refugees in the UK. It is part of the Helen Bamber Foundation, an internationally-recognised organisation dedicated to providing specialist therapeutic support to torture survivors.
The charity said that it had put the Home Office on warning that it intends to take ministers to court because the rulebook for officials now implementing the scheme undermines a key safeguard for refugees that remained in the plan.
In its detailed policy guidance, the Home Office tells caseworkers they “must” conclude Rwanda is safe even if they have been presented with compelling evidence that sets out why an individual could not be sent there because of their specific circumstances.
Caseworkers have also been ordered to ignore claims that Rwanda might send a migrant on to a dangerous country, even though the legislation seemingly allows individuals to present evidence that would leave them at risk of harm.
The risk that Rwanda would send migrants to countries that torture was the key factor in the Supreme Court’s decision last November to declare the original plan unlawful.
The government has previously said the wording of the legislation means that someone with a very specific and narrow case for protection would not to be sent to Rwanda if they would suffer irreparable harm. But in practice, predicts the charity, officials will end up refusing to consider such compelling evidence.
Asylum Aid says that if the Home Office does not change the directions to caseworkers, to give migrants a fair chance of presenting their case, they will ask a judge to rule whether ministers are failing to follow the law.
Alison Pickup, the charity’s director, said: “We have brought forward this legal action to ensure that the Home Office properly considers any individual cases against removal to Rwanda, including on the grounds that they would be returned from Rwanda to the place they fled.”
A Home Office spokesman said: “We remain confident in the country’s strong and successful track record in resettling people.”
Challenge by government union fast-tracked
Individual migrants could separately begin their own legal challenges from as early as next week – and on Friday another potentially crucial case moved a step closer.
The First Division Association, which represents senior civil servants, fears ministers will direct them to ignore any interim ruling from the European Court of Human Rights to delay a flight, even though they are under a legal duty to comply with court orders.
Mr Justice Chamberlain said government lawyers had confirmed that the earliest date for a flight would be 1 July – the first time that a specific date has been mentioned.
That meant there was a “powerful public interest” in fast-tracking the union’s case to a hearing in the first week of June, despite a government request for more time to prepare.
“The defendants [ministers] should not need as long as they have sought to file their detailed grounds, given that they have been on notice that a challenge on this issue was likely since March 2024,” he said.
The Home Office has been contacted for comment.
