Britain is sending refugees to Rwanda

The UK could pull out of Europe’s human rights framework after last-ditch legal rulings blocked the Government’s plans to relocate asylum seekers to Rwanda.

Downing Street said all options were on the table and did not rule out withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).

Home Secretary Priti Patel told MPs that three of the asylum seekers set to be on the first flight to Rwanda on Tuesday night had their removal blocked by the Strasbourg-based court, which interprets the ECHR.

Asked if the Government could withdraw from the ECHR, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: “We are keeping all options on the table including any further legal reforms that may be necessary.

“We will look at all of the legislation and processes in this round.”

Attorney General Suella Braverman echoed that position and said many people would be frustrated at the role played by a “foreign court”.

Pressed on whether withdrawing from the ECHR was a possibility, she told the BBC’s World At One programme: “We’re not ruling anything in and we’re not ruling anything out.”

She added: “We are definitely open to assessing all options available as to what our relationship should be going forward with the European Court of Human Rights.”

A succession of Tory MPs pushed for the UK to withdraw from the ECHR and the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg court.

Because neither the convention nor the court are European Union creations, the UK’s membership was unaffected by Brexit.

Alexander Stafford condemned the “despicable ruling from the foreign European Court of Justice” while Sir Desmond Swayne said: “We are going to have to grasp the nettle and extend the principle of ‘taking back control’ to the convention.”

Jonathan Gullis, a ministerial aide to Northern Ireland Secretary Brandon Lewis, said “the ECHR’s role in UK law needs looking at urgently” – but reportedly deleted an initial social media post suggesting the court’s role should be removed entirely.

Withdrawing from the ECHR would be fraught with difficulties because it underpins human rights obligations in international treaties including the Good Friday Agreement and the Brexit deal.

Pulling out of the convention, drawn up by the Council of Europe which Winston Churchill was instrumental in founding in the aftermath of the Second World War, would also risk damaging the UK’s reputation on the world stage.

Despite the focus on the ECHR, three of the asylum seekers due to be on the plane were granted injunctions by the Court of Appeal.

The court confirmed on Wednesday afternoon that three judges held an urgent hearing at 9.50pm on Tuesday – just 40 minutes before the flight was due to take off.

The ECHR has publicly confirmed details of just one of the cases heard by an out-of-hours judge.

It ruled that an Iraqi asylum seeker, referred to as KN, should not be put on a flight until three weeks after the final domestic court decisions on the legality of the whole Rwanda policy.

A full High Court review of the plan is expected in July but Downing Street indicated a new flight to Rwanda could take place before the legal process is completed.

The charity Care4Calais, which was involved in the legal battles, said seven men had originally been expected on the flight on Tuesday.

“Through the day, four of those seven made individual claims to the British courts to stop them being forcibly sent,” the charity said.

“Three more men had their deportations stopped by an intervention by the European Court of Human Rights.”

The Home Secretary told MPs it was “inevitable” there would be legal challenges to the Government’s policy.

But she added: “This Government will not be deterred from doing the right thing. We will not be put off by the inevitable legal last-minute challenges.”

In a reference to protests against the plans, she added: “Nor will we allow mobs to block removals.”

She said the Strasbourg court’s decisions “are not an absolute bar on their transfer to Rwanda”.

Anyone ordered to be released by the courts “will be tagged while we continue to progress their relocation”, she said.

Ms Patel and Prime Minister Boris Johnson have repeatedly hit out at the lawyers bringing legal challenges against the Government and the groups and MPs supporting them.

The Home Secretary told the Commons: “I am afraid the usual suspects, with the blessings of honourable and right honourable members opposite, have set out to thwart and even campaign against these efforts, and, with that, the will of the British people.”

Two asylum seekers who had their deportation to Rwanda halted by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) face a review of the decision from Monday.

The European court made a dramatic last minute intervention on Tuesday night, ruling that an Iraqi asylum seeker should not be removed to Rwanda until the lawfulness of the Home Office’s policy was established in the English courts.

The decision has been condemned by Tory politicians, and deputy prime minister Dominic Raab said on Thursday that the flight’s grounding strengthened the case for reforming human rights laws.

Tuesday’s ECHR ruling was followed by a flurry of legal applications from at least five other people scheduled to be on the 10.30pm flight from the Ministry of Defence’s airport, Boscombe Down.

In two of the cases, the ECHR decided to apply an “interim measure” to delay the asylum seeker’s removal until 6pm CET on Monday 20 June.

The court decided it should have more time for “their requests to be considered in greater detail”, according to an ECHR note. This means that the order against their removal could be thrown into doubt when the interim period runs out on Monday, an ECHR official told The Independent.

In a further two applications, asylum seekers’ requests for interim measures were rejected by the European court on Tuesday. The judge argued that the two asylum seekers had not made use of their legal options in the UK.

It is thought that lawyers had to go back to the UK High Court in a race against time to secure their client’s removal from the flight. They used the Iraqi asylum seeker’s first successful challenge to argue that the English courts should grant the asylum seekers a stay of removal, it is understood.

Deputy prime minister Dominic Raab said on Thursday that the interim measures used by the ECHR should not have force in the UK. He said: “In relation to the latest intervention from Strasbourg, so-called Rule 39 interim orders, which are not grounded in the European Convention, they’re based on the rules and procedure, internal rules of the court.

“I certaintly believe they should not have a legally binding effect under UK law.”

Despite the ECHR decision being reviewed on Monday, a lawyer representing one of the asylum seekers pulled from the Rwanda flight told The Independent that they did not expect the Home Office to pursue any deportations before their policy is tested in the courts in July.

Separately, director of public law at Duncan Lewis Solicitors, Toufique Hossain, said on Wednesday that it was “extremely unlikely” that a further flight could be chartered before the review process is completed.

“Anyone served removal directions can just go back to the High Court and the High Court will presumably grant the injunctive relief based on the ECHR ruling,” Mr Hossain said.

But he added: “It’s not unrealistic that they’re going to try, because it’s this government.”

Johnson doesn’t see poor asylum seekers. He sees a way to win byelections and survive

He has been derided as an uncontrollable shopping trolley, but there is calculation in how he tacks right to secure his position

Perhaps to his own surprise, Boris Johnson finds himself part of a generation of western leaders who are compelled to grapple with much more daunting global issues than they expected a few years back as they rose towards power. Yet whereas Joe Biden, Emmanuel Macron or Olaf Scholz all give the impression, to different degrees, that they grasp the interconnected seriousness of the moment and are attempting, with varying records of success, to address it, Johnson is completely different. For him, government is overwhelmingly about getting and maintaining office. Everything else – war, inflation, climate, public health – is secondary.

It is extremely important to understand this overriding priority. It may be impossible otherwise to make sense of some of Johnson’s political choices and stances. The Rwanda deportation row this week is the latest prime example, though it is far from the only one. There is no point trying to understand the attempted deportations as a policy that might be an attempt to solve a genuine problem – global asylum seeking. They can only be understood as performative politics for the benefit of the parts of the Conservative party that hold Johnson’s future in their hands.

Rationally, the attempt to fly a small handful of unwilling refugees to Rwanda this week is not only morally and legally questionable, it is also procedurally tendentious and premature. It was always clear that the policy – of picking up asylum seekers on the Kent coast and sending them to central Africa – would be tested in the courts, and this is indeed happening. The supreme court is due to rule on the issue in July. The legal cases of the past few days, including the European court of human rights order, have all been focused on trying to stop the government from jumping the gun.

So why is the government not waiting? The answer to that question lies not in any innovative brilliance or efficacy of the policy but in Johnson’s precarious political position. A week today, voters go to the polls in the two byelections that provide the next big threat to Johnson’s position. The one in Wakefield is being seen as a test of Johnson’s capacity to hold on to working-class seats in the north and Midlands against Labour, while that in Tiverton and Honiton is a paradigm examination of the Conservatives’ grip on rural seats in the south and west against the Liberal Democrats.

Although Johnson survived last week’s no-confidence vote provoked by his Downing Street lockdown parties, he is not out of the woods yet. A double defeat on 23 June would frighten dozens of Tory MPs far more thoroughly than many admit. Even if Johnson successfully retains the leadership through the summer, with the economy on the verge of recession and the cost of living crisis likely to tighten markedly as winter nears and fuel prices rise again, further challenges are likely.

The airfield scenes on Tuesday night, with the deportation flight aborted at the 11th hour, should thus be understood as deliberately performative. The wheeze was to spotlight the government’s hostility not just to asylum seekers but also to lawyers and judges. The intervention by the European court of human rights supplied a powerful and gratefully received emotional connection with the populist campaigns for sovereignty and Brexit (never mind that the ECHR is nothing formally to do with the European Union).

The target audiences in all this were the rightwing press and Tory voters in the two byelections. All that mattered was that they should have been aroused by the confrontation. If Guardian readers got angry, or Keir Starmer or Ed Davey made a fuss about it (which, perhaps significantly, neither of them did at prime minister’s questions on Wednesday), so much the better. In that context the financial cost was immaterial. If the Conservatives hold on to Tiverton and Honiton, and the threat to Johnson abates again for a while, it will be judged to have been worth every penny.

Dominic Cummings’s famous comparison of Johnson with a supermarket trolley, rolling first to one side of the political aisle and then to other, grabbing hold of whatever takes his fancy, is a stimulating one. But it implies that Johnson’s choices are entirely impulsive and random. This is not true. It underplays the reality that his recent career is marked by a certain consistency. He always tacks more readily to the right than to the centre when he is in trouble. He did this over relaxing the Covid regulations, over the Owen Paterson affair and over the Northern Ireland protocol. Now he is doing it over deportations to Rwanda and the Human Rights Act. Next week, it will be the rail strikes. He may well do it over the green agenda before he is much older.

This instinct to tack rightwards is about something larger than any of Johnson’s ideological views. It goes back to the fundamental choice that he made in 2016 to support rather than oppose Brexit. Then and afterwards, his aim was always to position the Tory party in a place where Nigel Farage could not split it from the right. It still is so today, even if Farage himself is no longer in the frontline.

The positioning, however, is often Potemkin-like. It looks rightwing, and that is what counts in the party. To Johnson, the policy reality of government is of far less concern than being the head of it. His politics is built more around campaigning and appearance than about work and achievement. Deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda matters less than being believed ready and willing to do it. What always concerns Johnson most is not what he does but what he is.