Peers are right to challenge the Rwanda bill – and to join our call to support Afghans who served this country

Two years, three home secretaries and £370m later, the Rwanda plan launched by Priti Patel and Boris Johnson has successfully deported the grand total of zero refugees to Kigali.

That, in its way, is something to celebrate. It was always morally wrong and legally problematic to treat people in this way, and placing them at risk of being returned to their countries of origin to be tortured to death was always the wrong thing to do, even if it cost very little.

The fact is that it costs a great deal and for no great purpose. As the latest attempt to revive the scheme arrives in the House of Lords – a hostile environment, if ever there was one – it faces yet more obstacles.

A large number of amendments aimed, with more or less sincerity, at improving, rather than destroying, the legislation is being discussed by the noble lords. It is an incongruous business. The fate of some of the most wretched and destitute people fleeing war and poverty is being discussed in their lordships’ sumptuous crimson and gilt chamber. No matter, though, if lives are saved.

One measure in particular deserves to be inserted in the bill, and indeed should be adopted by ministers as official policy in any case. It concerns the plight of Afghans who served with or alongside crown forces and otherwise worked directly or indirectly for the British government. The former defence secretary Desmond Browne has sought the very limited concession that Afghans who helped the British during the long and pitiless campaign should, in any case, be exempt from the threat of expulsion to Rwanda, if the scheme ever does become operational.

It is a compelling argument. We now know that some of these individuals should have been given asylum in the UK under the various Afghan resettlement schemes but have been denied. Some have suffered from bureaucratic pettifogging, a miserable attitude given their willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice for freedom. Others, who served in the British-trained Afghan special forces and who fought alongside British troops, have been allegedly vetoed by British special forces nervous about any testimony they might offer in any trials for war crimes.

Even if this were not the case, the delays in their processing have been unacceptable, given their status as brave allies. The case of one particular Afghan air force pilot championed by The Independent has now met with success, and he, and hopefully his family, will be able to build a new life in Britain rather than face death at the hands of the Taliban.

Cited by Lord Browne in Lords debates, and by other parliamentarians rightly moved by it, the story of this former Afghan air force lieutenant is a particularly tragic one – and instructive, too. Having been forced to flee from the Taliban, he had to come to the UK by an irregular route because he had no alternative, only to then face deportation.

There is nothing bogus about him. He then faced a Kafkaesque array of obstacles to justice. He first urged Rishi Sunak to intervene in his case in March after he fled from the Taliban. He also asked the prime minister to rescue his family, whom he had left behind; and for the same clemency to be shown towards other veterans who served alongside British forces.

The process proved protracted, even though The Independent tirelessly recruited a veritable battalion of public figures to press his case. The mobilisation included scores of military figures, celebrities and people from across the political divide who pledged their support to the campaign, including the former head of the British army General Sir Richard Dannatt, former head of Nato George Robertson, and Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer.

After five months of resisting this paper’s call to honour our debt to a war veteran who fought with UK forces, the government capitulated and the Home Office accepted the hero pilot’s right to asylum in the UK.

That victory for common decency and compassion was in August. It could and should have been done much sooner; it could and should be applied to all those making a similar plea. Indeed, hundreds of former Afghan special forces, the so-called “Triples”, after their military designation, remain at risk in Pakistan, the fear of deportation to Afghanistan hanging over them. They have been betrayed and forgotten, and it is a disgrace.

The Rwanda plan adds a particularly cruel twist to the tragic tale of these Afghan ex-service personnel. Put at its simplest, it is difficult to see what former Afghan troops and others working loyally with the British in their hour of need have done to deserve to be banished to eastern Africa. As is the case for so many others, it is as bizarre as it is inhumane.

With luck, the Lords and Commons will soon be embarked on a prolonged period of parliamentary “ping pong”, with amendments and counter-amendments ferried up and down the corridors in their own genteel war of attrition. It is true that the latest Rwanda bill comes from the elected chamber, and is proposed by ministers in a government that won a general election, in 2019. That mandate is looking a little tired and frayed but it still carries that democratic force.

However, as many peers have pointed out, it remains unconstitutional for parliament to pass a bill overruling a finding of fact made by a court of law – in this case, the Supreme Court. It is an abuse of parliamentary sovereignty and a violation of the separation of powers. Moreover, there was no mention of the Rwanda plan, or anything like it, in the Conservative general election manifesto, so ministers cannot rely on the Salisbury Convention to make the Lords concede on those grounds.

The fundamental fact found by the Supreme Court remains. Rwanda is not a safe third country for the purposes of resettling refugees. It is wrong to send anyone there, and least of all those who put their lives on the line for Britain.