Suella Braverman to visit Rwanda as £140m asylum agreement remains stalled

Suella Braverman is to visit Rwanda as Britain’s £140m deal to send asylum seekers to the country remains mired in legal challenges.

The home secretary is to reaffirm her commitment to the agreement struck in April 2022 by her predecessor Priti Patel, which has so far failed to achieve the government’s aim of deterring small boat crossings.

The Independent understands the publicly funded visit is her first to the country since becoming an MP, but Ms Braverman previously travelled to Rwanda with a Conservative Party project supported by the country’s president, Paul Kagame.

“Rwanda is a dynamic country with a thriving economy,” she told parliament on Monday. “I have enjoyed visiting it myself, twice, and I look forward to visiting it again.”

The home secretary will be departing for Kigali on Friday evening, accompanied by media representatives from outlets including GB News, the Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph. The BBC, The Independent, The Guardian, Daily Mirror and i newspaper were not invited.

Ms Braverman will meet senior Rwandan politicians and visit facilities set up as part of the Migration and Economic Development Partnership, which is an integral part of the new Illegal Migration Bill.

Rishi Sunak had a phone call with Mr Kagame on the day the bill was announced, with Downing Street saying they “committed to continue working together to ensure this important partnership is delivered successfully”.

The proposed law aims to allow the government to detain and deport asylum seekers who arrive by small boat without considering their claims, in what the UN Refugee Agency labelled an “asylum ban”.

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Legal challenges are expected and practical questions are mounting over where people can be sent, when the only deals struck have been with Albania and Rwanda.

Ms Braverman told MPs this week: “Our partnership with Rwanda is uncapped. We stand ready to operationalise it at scale as soon as is legally practicable.”

No asylum seekers have yet been sent to Kigali, and several people from countries including Iran, Iraq and Syria are challenging plans to remove them there.

Next month, Court of Appeal judges will consider arguments over the “adequacy of Rwanda’s asylum system” and whether the government erred in declaring it a safe country for the transfers.

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The High Court previously heard that politically-driven human rights violations including torture, murder and kidnappings saw Rwanda “ruled out” of consideration for an asylum deal by the Foreign Office in 2021.

But it was put back on the list of potential countries after “particular interest” was shown by Boris Johnson and Priti Patel.

The scheme remains on hold as the legal battle continues, and while the High Court ruled the policy legal as a whole in December, all individual removal decisions considered were quashed.

An attempted flight last June saw asylum seekers forcibly carried onto a plane and restrained, with some self-harming and threatening to kill themselves in desperate scenes before it was cancelled following European Court of Human Rights injunctions.

An initial £120m was paid to Rwanda on the signing of the agreement as “development funding”, and a further £20m was handed over for set-up costs later last year.

The Rwandan government has not ruled out requesting further payments, which come on top of a minimum of three years’ funding for each “relocated individual”.

Ms Braverman was a barrister and Conservative Party election candidate during her previous visits to Rwanda in 2008 and 2010, and has not publicised the work since being elected to parliament in 2015.

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At the time, she suggested that the country did not have a “properly functioning legal system”, but has since told MPs that Rwanda is a “fundamentally safe and secure country” suitable for receiving asylum seekers from the UK.

Writing in 2011 under her maiden name, Suella Fernandes, Ms Braverman said she was in a team of volunteer lawyers who “taught advocacy, legal drafting, negotiation and substantive law to judges, government lawyers, community justice lawyers and law students”.

She travelled with Project Umubano, which was described on its now-defunct website as “the Conservative Party’s social action project in Rwanda and Sierra Leone”.

It is not clear whether Ms Braverman met the Rwandan president, although Mr Kagame is understood to have attended some events and told a local newspaper Project Umubano was “meaningful and will help people back in the UK understand Rwanda better”.

Ms Braverman also co-founded a charity called the Africa Justice Foundation, which she subsequently left, that cooperated with Kigali and trained lawyers now working inside Rwanda’s justice ministry.