MSF statement on Supreme Court ruling of UK government's Rwanda plan

This is an encouraging result. The new Home Secretary now has a chance to abandon this pointlessly cruel approach, and focus instead on providing safe routes for those seeking sanctuary in the UK. This is the only realistic and humane way of reducing the numbers risking their lives in the Channel.

There is no way of implementing an ‘offshoring’ policy such as this without causing immense human suffering.

This policy would have caused huge harm to people who arrive seeking safety on our shores, only to be informed that they will be removed from the country on a one-way ticket to Rwanda. It would also have led to large-scale containment of people in unsanitary, overcrowded ‘reception centres’, where they would have remained in indefinite limbo waiting for the outcome of an evaluation to prove suitability to be transferred to Rwanda – a mechanism which apparently does not yet exist.

The Home Secretary must now abandon his predecessor’s misguided and inhumane fixation on ‘deterrence,’ which only leads to yet more suffering for desperate people seeking safety.