There is no evidence it works (BEN STANSALL/AFP via Getty Images)

Britain today is drastically different to the Britain I came to as a nine-year-old refugee almost 30 years ago. I left Kenya after burying my father, and travelled to Britain without my mother, with siblings I hardly knew. Somali families like ours fleeing war through Kenya in 1993 were often separated: some would never meet again. But this was a small price to pay for a potential new start somewhere else — and the chance of peace and security.
How easy my journey was compared to the challenges facing asylum seekers today. In a generation, I don’t recognise the nation we have become.
Last Tuesday, the British government failed to deport some 130 asylum seekers to Rwanda after a late intervention by the European Court of Human Rights. But it’s determined to try again. This week, Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab plans to unveil a new Bill of Rights that could give ministers powers to ignore injunctions from the ECHR and speed up the removal of asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Home Secretary Priti Patel insists the Rwanda plan is a “world-first” international partnership between “two outward-looking countries”. Except it is not a world first: it has been tried before and it failed.
The Rwanda plan is in fact a carbon copy of Israel’s “Voluntary Departure” programme that ran between 2014 and 2017. Its aim was to remove Eritrean and Sudanese refugees, all of them young men, to Rwanda and Uganda. These refugees, some of whom had lived more than five years in Israel, were given the choice between a life of misery in an Israeli jail, often somewhere in the desert, or to be given around $3,500 to be “voluntarily” deported to Rwanda or Uganda.
Yet Rwanda never fulfilled its side of the bargain. A harrowing report by Israeli researchers published in 2018 found that deportees from Israel had their travel documents confiscated on arrival in Rwanda, and were denied access to an asylum seeking process. Many were robbed of their money or incarcerated in a “hotel” on arrival. Just seven out of Israel’s thousands of deportees remained in Rwanda: the rest continued their life-threatening search for asylum elsewhere.