The UK's exportation of asylum obligations to Rwanda: A challenge to mental health, ethics and the law

Dirty work: well-intentioned mental health workers cannot ameliorate harms in offshore detention

“…We have reviewed1 the purpose of the detention centres,2 the conditions on the centres,3 the difficulty of providing helpful services to detainees,4 the suppression of witnessing or advocacy and5 the moral jeopardy of mental health provider dual loyalty. We have examined accounts that clinicians are being used to achieve policy objectives, rather than clinical aims.…”

“…A recent example is that the UK has proposed an offshore strategy, planning to send some illegal migrants to Rwanda to claim asylum there 2. This ‘is not just the administrative process that is being outsourced, but all responsibility for providing protection to those seeking sanctuary’,3 and the plan is unlikely to comply with conventions that prohibits inhuman and degrading treatment 4. Leaders in the UK, acknowledge that there are meagre medical and legal resources to support refugee care and processing in Rwanda.…”

The United Kingdom’s Rwanda asylum policy and the European Court of Human Rights’ Interim Measure: Challenges for mental health and the importance of social psychiatry

“…There has been much attention to the human rights concerns and legislative ramifications of the UK's scheme. For example, Sen et al (2022) rightly highlight Rwanda's inadequate human rights record and the UK's international legal obligations. Consequently, we believe this scheme threatens international and humanitarian commitments, like the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3: Good Health and Well-being (United Nations, 2015).Whilst some have praised the policy's deterrent effects (Migration Watch, 2022), in the authors' view, it is morally questionable to exploit threats to the human rights of at-risk individuals and vulnerable patient groups as politicised slogans.…”

“…Under this scheme, all affected individuals would be victims of double jeopardy, leaving poorer socioeconomic and healthcare conditions (or dangerous environments like conflict zones), before facing mandatory removal. Resultantly, physicians have described these plans as 'knowingly [harming] the health of an already vulnerable population' (Dehghan et al, 2022), which may provoke moral injuries in caregivers and destabilise the therapeutic relationship (Sen et al, 2022).…”

Echoes of Colour Discrimination in Refugee Protection Regime: The Experience of Africans Fleeing the Russia-Ukrainian War

“…The intrinsic criminalisation as well as the commoditisation of migrants (and in particular, migrants of colour) in the now tabled fiveyear deal threatened to reimagine the inherent dangers that refugees pose, limit their ability to engage and assimilate in their new home communities and foreclose the possibility of a secure future (Balaguera, 2018;Kohnert, 2022). Complicating the process further, we must note that Rwanda, a country with its own history of human rights abuses, would have had the authority to decide whether to grant asylum to the deported if the program had come to pass (see critique in Nair, 2022;Sen, et al, 2022).…”