Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

Comment by logifail | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

> that Rwanda is a safe country to which asylum seekers can be sent

Putting aside whether the UK government's approach is a sensible one (which in my view it isn't) we should be aware that:

"the UNHCR, with financial support from the EU, has transferred refugees from Libya to Rwanda under a scheme called the Emergency Transit Mechanism (ETM) [..] The ETM offers vulnerable refugees, taken into detention by the Libyan authorities, a choice to have their application processed in Rwanda."[0]

"In 2019, the [Rwandan] Government established the Emergency Transit Mechanism (ETM) Centre that hosted 824 refugees evacuated from Libya. Currently, the transit centre hosts 371 evacuees while working on long-term solutions continues. By the end of 2021, 462 refugees had resettled to third countries so far."[1]

So Rwanda was apparently safe enough for the UNHCR to offer to process some refugees there.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67431602

[1] https://www.unhcr.org/uk/countries/rwanda

The UK courts partly relied on evidence that those asylum seekers were not always treated in accordance with the convention. The Supreme Court judgment noted cases of refoulement (expulsion to the state the asylum seeker is fleeing from) as well as structural deficiencies in the decision-making process. (https://www.bailii.org/uk/cases/UKSC/2023/42.html at paragraphs 89 and onwards).

They also suggested that the UNHCR was mostly processing applications for asylum in third countries for ETM evacuees. An obvious difference with the UK scheme is that we expect Rwanda to grant asylum themselves.

> So Rwanda was apparently safe enough for the UNHCR to offer to process some refugees there.

I think the key word here is safer. It wasn’t safe by any definition of the word, but a fair deal safer than the place they came from.

> It wasn’t safe by any definition of the word, but a fair deal safer than the place they came from

(Playing devil's advocate) why would this not also apply to those refugees fleeing to Europe?

Isn't Rwanda "a fair deal safer" than Afghanistan? (This is a genuine question)

When they are being removed from the UK to Rwanda (which is the aim of UK government), "the place they came from" is the UK.

Q: Is France "safe" compared to the UK?

What does this have to do with anything?

The reason people are trying to get to the UK from France (and other countries) is they are trying to apply for asylum in the UK. Not in France, in the UK. And the reason they have to do that in the UK is the fact the UK cancelled the possibility to apply for asylum at its embassies. So if you don't want people coming from France to ask for asylum, enable the option to apply at the embassy and you are done. Simple, and you will save many lives.

Now of course the same applies to all western countries. There are lots of people trying to come here, some for legitimate reasons, some not, and also we need some of them because of shortage of workers, even if we don't say it loud, because even more would try to come. All western countries allow to apply for asylum only on their soil, thus creating a humanitarian catastrophe, because while the right to asylum is enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, it does not say how hard can it be to apply.

But all of this is to say it does not matter whether France is or is not a safe country. We could arrange for international cooperation where asylum seekers could ask for asylum and while their application is processed they would stay in some safe country, but next to no safe country will do this because of internal political reasons, so what remains is treating asylum seekers like hot potatoes and not people. It's a sad state of affairs, but there are too many factors and no easy way to direct the blame.

> The reason people are trying to get to the UK from France (and other countries) is they are trying to apply for asylum in the UK

Why is applying for asylum in the UK more appealing to them than applying for asylum in France?

> But all of this is to say it does not matter whether France is or is not a safe country

If we accept that France is a safe country then doesn't it follow that there is no need for anyone to cross the English channel in a small boat in order to claim asylum?

Unless of course you are someone who is being persecuted by the French and are therefore seeking safety with the English, but since it's been over 200 years since those two countries were at war with each other so that sounds somewhat unlikely.

Gerald Knaus[0] observed last year that although there is a right to asylum, there is no right to migration[1].

[0] https://www.esiweb.org/esi-staff/gerald-knaus [1] https://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2023-11/asylpolitik-asyl...

> Why is applying for asylum in the UK more appealing to them than applying for asylum in France?

I don't really care about that. There are plenty of people applying for asylum in many countries.

> If we accept that France is a safe country then doesn't it follow that there is no need for anyone to cross the English channel in a small boat in order to claim asylum?

No, this is not how this works. You can't force them to apply in France. They are people and they have their rights. And France is a sovereign country, you can't force them either. Maybe you could try to negotiate with France and the EU, like the EU negotiated a deal with Turkey, but I understand currently UK prefers to do questionable deals with Rwanda before engaging with EU members.

> there is no right to migration

Of course, that's not an open question.

> No, this is not how this works.

I fear this attitude is partially responsible for the fall in support for what I guess we can call "centrist" parties. The harder this issue is pushed, the more the radical parties win support.

> You can't force them to apply in France.

"The Dublin Convention covering the European Union stipulates that asylum seekers are returned to the country where their entry into the union was first recorded, and where they were first fingerprinted"[0]

Well, perhaps not UK -> France thanks to Brexit, but according to the Dublin convention you certainly can return them to the first safe EU country in which they were recorded.

See "Asylum Shopping"[0] - a term for the practice by some asylum seekers of applying for asylum in several states or seeking to apply in a particular state after traveling through other states.

"In Ireland, two-thirds of asylum seekers whose applications failed were found to be already known to the British border authorities, a third of the time under a different nationality, such as Tanzanians claiming to be fleeing persecution in Somalia"[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asylum_shopping [1] https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/two-thirds-of-failed-a...

> I fear this attitude

I understand that, but it's not like the governments wouldn't like this issue to go away; things really don't work the way some people would like, for very fundamental reasons, like human rights.

> Well, perhaps not UK -> France thanks to Brexit

exactly.

> according to the Dublin convention you certainly can return them to the first safe EU country

Yeah, and so what does a YOLOing country like Hungary do? Exactly, it does not register them and just ignores them so they can go to the next country. So what do you do when you are next in the line like Slovakia, my home country? Exactly, you just pass them on till they get to their target country (Germany mostly in our case). This also happens in thousand-strong waves.

So again, it's not like the UK is unique in this, it's an issue in all of Europe and the US and there are no easy solutions. Even a fascist like Meloni does not have a solution.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com