Watch as the UK government challenges a ruling that its plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is unlawful on Tuesday 10 October.
The Home Office is challenging a Court of Appeal ruling from June that the UK’s multimillion-pound deal with the east African nation over the processing of asylum claims was unlawful.
Lawyers representing migrants facing deportation to Rwanda have told the Supreme Court that the destination is an “authoritarian, one-party state” with a “woefully deficient” asylum system.
During the first of a three-day hearing over the case, Raza Husain KC, representing a number of asylum seekers, said Rwanda “imprisons, tortures and murders those it considers to be its opponents”, adding that Home Office officials had “repeatedly recorded their concerns about it”.
Mr Husain said home secretary Suella Braverman “does not dispute the state of the Rwandan asylum system significantly… but rather seeks to ignore it”.
He added it was the government’s case that Rwanda’s assurances “change everything” and that the past is “of little relevance”, making reference to “evidence of large-scale abuse” under a similar previous agreement the country had with Israel.
Mr Husain said the government’s “extravagant claims” in its Supreme Court appeal “should be rejected”.
