Keir Starmer says scrapping UK’s Rwanda migrant deportation plan
Al Jazeera
Previous Conservative government’s policy was ‘never a deterrent’, new PM says, calling it ‘dead and buried’.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer says he will not continue with the previous Conservative government’s policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
“The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started. It’s never been a deterrent,” Starmer told his first news conference on Saturday, after his Labour Party won a landslide in the general election.
“I’m not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don’t act as a deterrent,” he told reporters after a cabinet meeting, describing the plan as a “problem that we are inheriting”.
The contentious law was approved in April by parliament, which declared Rwanda to be a safe third country, bypassing an earlier UK Supreme Court ruling that said the scheme was unlawful on human rights grounds.
The authorities started detaining asylum seekers in May.
