U.K. Migration Plan May Propose Offshore Detention for Asylum Seekers

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Rights advocates swiftly condemned the proposed bill, which they say not only violates international law but also would be impossible to carry out.

By Megan Specia
July 6, 2021
Updated 8:42 a.m. ET

LONDON — The British government will propose on Tuesday a plan to put asylum seekers in offshore detention centers and arrest those who arrive by boat over the English Channel, policies that rights groups say would violate international laws protecting refugees.

The plan, called the Nationality and Borders Bill, is expected to be brought forth by Priti Patel, the British home secretary, for a first reading in Parliament on Tuesday. It is the latest measure introduced by the government to “fix the broken asylum system,” as the Home Office described it in a statement.

Ms. Patel, writing in the newspaper The Daily Mail before the bill’s introduction, outlined proposals to “create a new criminal offense of entering the country illegally, giving Border Force more scope to make arrests, and we will increase prison sentences for those who do so.”

The plan, if it were to go into effect, would place Britain in the company of Denmark, which recently passed a law allowing for the offshore detention of refugees, and Australia, which has already put in place similar measures, in adopting what until recent years had been considered a fringe approach to the issue.


Andy Hewett, head of advocacy for the Refugee Council, which works with refugees in Britain, said the new policy would essentially create a system that criminalizes anyone arriving in the country by irregular means.

Mr. Hewett added that the idea that migrants who arrived, say, by truck or by boat, were “somehow less genuine than refugees who arrived by resettlement, for example, is completely false.”

The refugee proposal already seems primed to emerge as the latest flash point in Britain’s simmering culture wars, stoked in large part by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Michelle Pace, a professor in global studies at Roskilde University in Denmark and an associate fellow at Chatham House, a British think tank, said, “From a purely legal position, there is no way that these plans can actually be implemented.” She noted that any policy that involved the expulsion of asylum seekers would violate the United Nations 1951 Refugee Convention, to which Australia, Britain and Denmark are signatories.

“So the question that we have to ask is — in the case of the U.K. — who is Priti Patel really addressing here?” Professor Pace said, pointing to public pressure on a government that has increasingly taken an anti-immigration stance.


Critics of the Johnson government say it has made a practice of raising divisive cultural issues that it believes will translate into votes from the working class voters it has drawn away from the opposition Labour Party in recent years — with Brexit being another prime example.

Frequently, apparently harsh or extreme measures have been leaked to the news media or introduced in Parliament with great fanfare, only to be forgotten, the critics say. In recent years, the government has proposed that voters be required to show photo identification, attacked the BBC’s financing model and called for 10-year prison sentences for vandalizing statues. None of these measures are currently close to being enacted into law.

Now, critics say, new immigration measures — at a time of falling immigration levels — are the next to be teed up.

“What is, in effect, the stance of this political gimmick, is that they’re trying to tell the general public, ‘We are doing something about this,’” Professor Pace said.

More troublingly, she added, the moves were part of a broader shirking of international humanitarian obligations by established democracies long known as defenders of those rights.

“I just fear that as a global community, we are really dehumanizing the lives of those that, at the end of the day, are people like me and you,” Professor Pace said.

The Times of London reported last week that representatives from the Home Office had met with Danish officials about potential cooperation at a processing center abroad, possibly in Rwanda, though that report has not been independently verified.

Lawmakers from the Labour Party quickly denounced the plan, with Nick Thomas-Symonds, who speaks for the party on domestic affairs, calling the measures “unconscionable.”

Advocates for refugee rights also condemned the plan, saying that the bill was fundamentally at odds with the rights of asylum seekers under international law and did little to address other problems in the asylum process, citing as examples the huge backlogs in applications and inhumane conditions at existing processing centers.

Professor Pace said that she saw the recent push by Britain and Denmark for offshore asylum processing as part of a problematic policy shift and a worrying trend to target voters and appease those calling for a clampdown on migration — amounting, she said, to the “institutionalization of inhumanity.”

Australia’s use of offshore detention centers for asylum seekers has long drawn condemnation, with reports of desperate living conditions and high rates of suicide among detainees, and critics say that some of the country’s practices contravene the Refugee Convention. But the Australian authorities have defended the policies as a necessary step to deter irregular migration.

Rights advocates dismissed the reported British plan as an inhumane and unrealistic political ploy that failed to address the country’s obligations to protect asylum seekers.

“It doesn’t adequately deal with any of the issues, it’s just more saber rattling from Priti Patel,” said Bridget Chapman, a spokeswoman for the Kent Refugee Action Network, a group in the southeastern part of England where many migrant boats that cross the English Channel from mainland Europe arrive.


Ms. Chapman said that Britain had “a shared responsibility” to accept people who were applying for asylum and should not rely on countries like Lebanon, Turkey and Mediterranean countries to hold them.

“We can’t outsource that to poorer countries, that’s an abdication of responsibility,” Ms. Chapman added. “They are not unmanageable numbers.”

The rising number of migrants and asylum seekers crossing the English Channel in small boats has been a rallying cry for anti-immigrant groups.

But migration experts say that the number of those boat crossings — somewhere about 5,000, according to estimates from The Times of London and the BBC — signal a shift in migration routes, rather than a surge in total new arrivals. While boat arrivals were up in the last year, the overall number of asylum applications was down, falling by 18 percent in 2020, compared with 2019.

Historically, migrants and asylum seekers hid in the back of trucks and crossed from ports in northern France or elsewhere in Europe as the main routes of irregular entry, a much less visible phenomenon. Stepped up patrolling of freight traffic, particularly coming from the French port of Calais, and the shutdown of other forms of travel during the pandemic shifted smuggling routes to the boat crossings, experts say.

The Refugee Council, the advocacy group, recently released a report on the huge backlog in asylum application processing in Britain, despite the drop in new applicants. According to that study, the number of people waiting for more than a year for an initial decision has risen almost tenfold in the last decade, to 33,016 in 2020, from 3,588 in 2010.

Mr. Hewett of the Refugee Council said that measures introduced so far have failed to act as a deterrent, adding that his organization and other refugee advocates would like to see a shift toward establishing safe and legal routes for asylum seekers to obtain humanitarian visas.


“Everything the government has done to date has failed, but they seem absolutely intent on following the same path,” Mr. Hewett said.

Longer term, the plan potentially sets a “dangerous precedent,” he said.

“What you could end up with is the majority of people fleeing persecution, being detained or housed in developing countries that don’t have the infrastructure,” Mr. Hewett said. “That really undermines our global refugee protection system and the principle of responsibility sharing.”

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