As reported last week on our blog, the United Kingdom has adopted a new plan to send some of their asylum seekers to Rwanda. Once sent to Rwanda, those granted asylum would reportedly be allowed to remain in Rwanda and those denied their claims may be deported.
As the BBC and other outlets have written, more than 160 non-governmental organizations have written an open letter denouncing the plan, calling it “shamefully cruel.”
Max Fisher has a thoughtful article on the plan in yesterday’s New York Times. It highlights how the UK is not the first nation to send asylum seekers to a far away location. For example, in 1991 the United States sent Haitian refugees to Guantanamo Bay.
Mary Bosworth’s work on noncitizen prisoners in the UK also provides important context for this new development. As Bosworth documented in her 2017 article, Penal Humanitarianism? Sovereign Power in an Era of Mass Migration, published in the New Criminal Law Review, the UK has a history engaging in “offshore practices” to criminalize noncitizens and asylum seekers . Here’s the abstract:
Since creating the Returns and Reintegration Fund in 2008, the British government has financed a variety of initiatives around the world under the rubric of “managing migration,” blurring the boundaries between migration control and punishment. This article documents and explores a series of overlapping case studies undertaken in Nigeria and Jamaica where the United Kingdom has funded prison building programs, mandatory prisoner transfer agreements, prison training programs, and resettlement assistance for deportees. These initiatives demonstrate in quite concrete ways a series of interconnections between criminal justice and migration control that are both novel and, in their postcolonial location, familiar. In their ties to international development and foreign policy, they also illuminate how humanitarianism allows penal power to move beyond the nation state, raising important questions about our understanding of punishment and its application.
IE