In response to the UK government’s plan to send people seeking asylum to Rwanda to process their claims, Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s Refugee and Migrant Rights Director, said:

“Sending people to another country - let alone one with such a dismal human rights record - for asylum ‘processing’ is the very height of irresponsibility and shows how far removed from humanity and reality the Government now is on asylum issues. 

“The Government is already wrecking our asylum system at huge cost to the taxpayer while causing terrible anxiety to the people stuck in the backlogs it has created.

“But this shockingly ill-conceived idea will go far further in inflicting suffering while wasting huge amounts of public money. 

“With its tired rhetoric about tackling criminal smuggling gangs, the Government is ignoring the fact that very few people actually seek asylum in the UK compared to other countries while continuing with policies that enable those gangs to profit.

“After the chaos and bureaucracy-ridden failures of schemes the Government clearly never truly wanted for Afghans and Ukrainians, this is a hugely-misjudged distraction from the core work of creating a humane and properly-functioning asylum system which the UK so desperately needs and the public so clearly want.”