LONDON, UK
The leader of the Anglican church strongly criticized the British government’s plan to put some asylum-seekers on one-way flights to Rwanda, saying “sub-contracting out our responsibilities” to refugees can’t stand up to God’s scrutiny.
Archbishop of Canterbury
Justin Welby made the unusually direct political intervention in his Easter
Sunday sermon, saying there are “serious ethical questions about sending
asylum-seekers overseas.”
He said “sub-contracting out
our responsibilities, even to a country that seeks to do well, like Rwanda, is
the opposite of the nature of God who himself took responsibility for our
failures.”
Speaking at Canterbury
Cathedral in southeast England, Welby said that while “the details are for
politics and politicians, the principle must stand the judgment of God — and it
cannot.”
Britain and Rwanda announced
Thursday that they had struck an agreement that will see some people arriving
in the U.K. as stowaways on trucks or in small boats sent 4,000 miles (6,400
kilometers) to the East African country, where their asylum claims will be
processed and, if successful, they will stay in Rwanda.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s
Conservative government says the plan will discourage people from making
dangerous attempts to cross the English Channel, and put people-smuggling gangs
who run the treacherous route out of business. More than 28,000 migrants
entered the U.K. across the Channel last year, up from 8,500 in 2020. Dozens
have died, including 27 people in November when a single boat capsized.
Refugee and human rights
groups called the plan inhumane, unworkable and a waste of taxpayers’ money.
The U.N. refugee agency said it was “contrary to the letter and spirit of the
Refugee Convention.”
Another senior Anglican cleric, Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell, called the Rwanda plan “depressing and distressing.”
“After all, there is in law no
such thing as an illegal asylum-seeker,” he said in an Eastern sermon at York
Minster cathedral in northern England. “It is the people who exploit them that
we need to crack down on, not our sisters and brothers in their need.”
The deal — for which the U.K.
has paid Rwanda 120 million pounds ($158 million) upfront — leaves many
questions unanswered, including its final cost and how participants will be
chosen. The U.K. says children, and families with children, won’t be sent to
Rwanda.
Senior civil servants in the
Home Office, the government department responsible for immigration policy,
raised concerns about the plan but were overruled by Home Secretary Priti
Patel.
The Home Office said in a
statement that Britain had settled hundreds of thousands of refugees from
around the world.
However, the world is facing a
global migration crisis on an unprecedented scale and change is needed to
prevent vile people smugglers putting people’s lives at risk and to fix the
broken global asylum system,” it said.
Alf Dubs, a Labour Party
member of the House of Lords who came to Britain as a child refugee from the
Nazis in 1939, said the plan was likely “a breach of the 1951 Geneva
conventions on refugees.” He said the Lords, Parliament’s upper chamber, would
challenge the move.
Johnson acknowledged Thursday
that the plan would likely be challenged in court by what he called
“politically motivated lawyers” out to ”frustrate the government.”
Political opponents accuse
Johnson of using the headline-grabbing policy to distract attention from his
political troubles. Johnson is resisting calls to resign after being fined
by police for attending a party in his office in 2020 that broke
coronavirus lockdown rules. - AP
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