British MPs vote to support government plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda

The bill seeks to overcome a ruling by the U.K. Supreme Court that the plan to permanently send migrants across the English Channel in boats to Rwanda is illegal.

British lawmakers voted Tuesday to support the government’s plan to send some asylum-seekers on a one-way trip to Rwanda, keeping alive a policy that has angered human rights groups and cost the U.K. at least US$300 million, without a single flight getting off the ground.

The House of Commons voted 313-269 to approve the government’s Rwanda bill in principle, sending it on for further scrutiny. The result averts a defeat that would have left Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s authority shredded and his government teetering. It buys Sunak some breathing space, but tees up further wrangling in the coming weeks.

The bill seeks to overcome a ruling by the U.K. Supreme Court that the plan to send migrants who reach Britain across the English Channel in boats to Rwanda — where they would stay permanently — is illegal.

The Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill faces criticism both from Conservative centrists who think it skirts with breaking international law, and from lawmakers on the party’s authoritarian right, who say it doesn’t go far enough to ensure migrants who arrive in the U.K. without permission can be deported.

The government was so nervous about the result that it ordered Climate Minister Graham Stuart to fly back from the COP28 summit in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, where negotiations are in their final hours, for the vote.

But after threatening to block the bill on Tuesday, many of the hard-liners abstained in hopes of toughening it up later in the legislative process.

After the vote, Sunak said on social media that “the British people should decide who gets to come to this country — not criminal gangs or foreign courts. That’s what this Bill delivers.”

The Rwanda plan is an expensive, highly controversial policy that hasn’t sent a single person to the East African country so far. But it has become a totemic issue for Sunak, central to his pledge to “stop the boats” bringing unauthorized migrants to the U.K. across the English Channel from France. More than 29,000 people have done so this year, down from 46,000 in all of 2022.