rights groups and refugee organisations criticising what they called an “inhumane”, “neo-colonial” plan. “It’s truly shocking and inhumane,” Steve Valdez-Symonds, the refugee and migrant rights programme director at Amnesty International UK, told Al Jazeera. “The plan is not going to decrease the number of refugees. It will inflict a huge amount of cruelty and fuel more dangerous refugee routes to be set up.”
The UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) and a former and the current archbishop of Canterbury were also among those who have widely condemned the proposal. In a scathing intervention in his Easter Sunday sermon, the head of the Church of England, Justin Welby, said the plan to deport asylum seekers thousands of miles from where they sought sanctuary is comparable to “subcontracting our responsibilities” and the “opposite of the nature of God”. Coming to the defence of his successor, a former archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, described the policy as sinful. “The policy itself seems to me to be not in accord with what I understand about God,” he told Times Radio.
This week, the Home Secretary Priti Patel hit back at those who criticised the proposal saying they have failed to offer any alternative solution to the migration crisis. In a joint article with the Rwandan foreign minister Vincent Biruta, Patel wrote in the Times that the new scheme is the act of a “humanitarian nation”, describing that the partnership between London and Kigali as “groundbreaking”. “We are taking bold and innovative steps and it’s surprising that those institutions that criticise the plans fail to offer their own solutions,” she said, adding that the plans would help put an end to the “deadly trade” of people trafficking. “We can provide legal, safe, orderly and controlled ways for people to better their lives, flee oppression, persecution or conflict and enjoy new opportunities,” the Home Secretary noted.
