On the afternoon of 14 June 2022, as the clock ticked nearer to takeoff, Hamza was sitting alone in a van, handcuffed, crying. Like dozens of other men selected for removal to Rwanda, he had come to Britain in search of refuge after fleeing mortal danger in his home country. The first he had heard of Rwanda was when he received a letter from the Home Office in mid-May, sent to the detention centre where he was being held a few weeks after he crossed the Channel from France.
“I’m being relocated to Rwanda – what does this mean for me?” read the title of a factsheet Hamza was later given. “Rwanda is a fundamentally safe and secure country,” the document continued. “It is known as ‘the land of a thousand hills’ due to its striking landscape and is home to a wide array of wildlife.” Rwandans, it added, “are friendly to visitors”.
“I lost my mind when I heard that I would be sent to Rwanda,” Hamza told me when we spoke recently. Hamza is from the Middle East, and the prospect of being sent to a part of the world he knew little about made him “extremely frightened and worried”. Like many of the men selected for deportation, he saw the UK as his only hope of refuge. Most contacted lawyers, who rushed to lodge appeals on their behalf within the tight seven-day deadline set by the Home Office.
Just as the van was about to leave for the airport, Hamza received news that he’d been given a reprieve. “A security guard came and told me: there’s no need to cry, your trip’s been cancelled.”
The fallout from those two months in 2022 – from April, when Britain announced an “innovative” new deal to send unwanted asylum-seekers to live in Rwanda, to June, when the first planned deportation flight was cancelled amid a flurry of legal challenges – has dominated the headlines ever since. For Britain, the policy was supposed to provide a powerful deterrent to migrants crossing the Channel. For Rwanda, it was a diplomatic coup.
Instead, the first attempt at a deportation flight ended in embarrassing failure. Knowing it was likely to lose many of the appeals – made by people who said they’d been tortured, or trafficked, or had family members in the UK – the Home Office kept cancelling bookings as the departure date approached. In the weeks leading up to 14 June, the dozens of men booked on to the flight were whittled down to 30, then a handful, then none.
In Kigali, Rwanda’s capital, officials had boasted of the lavish facilities awaiting the new arrivals, but preparations there were coming unstuck, too. “Just received word from [redacted] that they cannot fulfil their obligation with the interpreters,” wrote a Home Office civil servant on the afternoon of 13 June, the day before the flight was due to depart. It seemed that Rwanda couldn’t find any interpreters who spoke Vietnamese, Pashto, Sorani Kurdish or Albanian.
On the evening of 14 June, just an hour or two before takeoff, the Home Office cancelled the flight altogether, after an order by the European court of human rights that one of the men booked on to the flight should remain in the UK until his case could be heard in full. Since then, the deportation plan has effectively been on hold, as a complex legal challenge to the policy works its way through the courts.
The case has outlasted Boris Johnson and Priti Patel’s time in government. Their successors, Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman, insist the deal is still on track. The government blames politically motivated lawyers for the cancelled flight, claiming they were trying to sabotage the policy on technicalities. The lawyers point out that they were acting on behalf of their clients – people who see the UK as their only hope and who were simply asking not to be deported, as is their right.
In June 2023, a devastating appeal court decision found that Rwanda was not a safe destination for asylum-seekers, casting the deportation scheme into further doubt. Rwanda’s assurances about its own asylum system, even if they had been given in good faith, couldn’t be trusted, said a panel of judges by a two-to-one majority. British officials, under pressure to get the deal done as quickly as possible, hadn’t done a good enough job of checking them out.
The policy isn’t dead yet, though. Sunak’s government has staked its reputation on the prospect of planes taking off for Kigali, and is appealing to the supreme court, which will start hearing arguments on 9 October. The government will argue that it – rather than the courts – is best placed to decide whether Rwanda is safe, since it has the institutional expertise to do so. But the evidence already made public in court suggests a different story: one of institutional dysfunction and a bureaucracy flailing under relentless political pressure to make a deal happen at all costs.
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From the outset, the British government knew it was taking a huge risk. In theory, the plan was to create a deterrent so severe that it would scare migrants off making the dangerous journey across the Channel. Yet as Matthew Rycroft, the most senior civil servant at the Home Office, wrote to home secretary Patel shortly before the policy was announced in April 2022, “evidence of a deterrent effect is highly uncertain”.
That was just one in a long list of warnings given to ministers by their own officials over the course of a year and a half. From the summer of 2020, as more and more people started crossing the Channel in small boats and the government came under criticism for being apparently unable to stop them, Johnson scrambled for a solution. The answer, the government decided, was to pay another country to take in Britain’s unwanted new arrivals.
With Patel overseeing the project, and officials from No 10 snapping away in the background, the Foreign Office was delegated to lead the search for a partner. Their first task was to draw up a shortlist. On 8 October 2020, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, approved a set of minimum standards for any partnership. Countries would be excluded if they had not signed up to the refugee convention, if they were war zones, or if they were places “where individuals faced a real risk of violations of international human rights law”.
That should have ruled Rwanda out from the start. Britain has a close relationship with Rwanda: the UK has given it more than £1bn in aid since the 1990s, when the country was wracked by civil war and a genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of people. British leaders from Tony Blair onwards have taken pride in their contribution to an African success story: a country of 14 million people that has made its way up the human development index in the last few decades. In 2009, Rwanda became one of the few countries to join the Commonwealth that hadn’t been colonised by Britain.
But Rwanda’s economic development has come at the price of autocracy, repression and murder. Under Paul Kagame, who has been president since 2000, the government has shut down independent media, placed Rwanda’s people under an intensive surveillance regime and resorted to brutal means of silencing its critics.
If British ministers were unclear about that in the autumn of 2020, then they could have asked their own ambassador. In September, the British high commissioner in Kigali sent a diplomatic telegram back to London, raising alarm at Rwanda’s “human rights story”. Rwanda’s “human rights record and lack of political space sits at odds with UK and Commonwealth values,” read the message. Opposition activists faced “intimidation and harassment, including detention on politically motivated charges”, and some had been “disappeared or killed”. And while the Rwandan constitution purports to guarantee freedom of speech, “in practice, the fear of arrest or disappearance leads journalists to heavily self-censor”.
On 16 November, Foreign Office civil servants presented Raab with a shortlist of 30 countries. Rwanda wasn’t on it. But many of those that were – like North Macedonia and Brazil, according to reporting by the journalists Nicola Kelly and Jack Shenker – said no outright. Others, like Albania and Ghana, issued furious denials when their names were leaked to the media.
In early 2021, with No 10 growing impatient, the Foreign Office drew up a longlist of 47 more countries. This time Rwanda was on it. “Our recommendation … would be not to pursue Rwanda as an option,” said the high commission in Kigali, when London asked for more information. When the longlist was cut back into a new shortlist of seven countries, Rwanda was left out once again.
But by now, spring was approaching – and with the warming weather, the possibility that small boat crossings would rise once more. In March, to get ahead of the issue, Patel unveiled her draconian New Plan for Immigration. Later passed into law as the Nationality and Borders Act, it promised to deter migrants from crossing the Channel by giving the government the power to deport asylum-seekers to a “safe third country”.
The policy sounded tough: asylum-seekers who arrived in the UK without permission wouldn’t merely be sent offshore for “processing”; they would be sent away for good. But there was still no third country to send them to.
By the end of March, Johnson’s office had grown even more impatient. According to an internal Foreign Office memo on 29 March, No 10 was “keen to have more material on locations outside the seven proposed countries”. Three days later, officials reported that “the PM himself is chasing”. Perhaps, suggested No 10 later still in April, they could look again at the viability of Rwanda.
Again, the Foreign Office said no. “FS [the foreign secretary’s] private office have provided us with a clear steer not to proceed”, officials reported on 23 April. A month later, however, the foreign secretary appeared to change his mind. “No country should be taken off the list of potentials without very careful analysis and engagement,” Raab wrote to his civil servants on 26 May. The “exam question”, as he put it, was not whether a country’s current human rights standards were fit for refugees, but whether they could be in future, “with financial support” from the UK. In mid-June, after Johnson had once again “shared his frustration at the rate of progress”, Raab authorised his diplomats in Kigali to make an informal approach to their hosts.
On 24 June 2021, officials had good news to report. Rwanda was one of the countries “keen to engage on tackling [the] migration crisis”, they said, though the offer should be presented as a “value proposition”.
In other words, the Rwandans wanted to know what was in it for them.
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The Rwandan government has a reputation as a canny negotiator – dealing with donors was like “milking a cow”, one Rwandan politician famously quipped – and their interest in this deal has always been more than merely financial.
On the one hand, it helps this small country to punch above its weight diplomatically. Rwanda has become something of a specialist in helping wealthier countries outsource their migration management. In 2013, it struck a deal with Israel to take charge of several thousand Eritrean refugees that Israel wanted to expel. In 2019, it agreed to temporarily host refugees who had become trapped in Libya in their attempt to reach Europe. In 2021, Rwanda signed an agreement with Denmark for a migration deal similar to the one with the UK. (Denmark has since paused its plans while the EU searches for a Europe-wide deal instead.)
As Kagame put it in a 2019 speech, his aim was to show that “Africa itself is also a source of solutions”. And it’s not just migration deals: Rwanda’s military carries out peacekeeping operations in parts of Africa where western troops might once have done the job, while last year Kagame proudly announced that construction on Africa’s first Covid vaccine factory had begun in Kigali. As Eric Ndushabandi, a prominent Rwandan political scientist, put it to me, international cooperation helps promote Rwanda’s international image as “a reconciled society … a place of peace and security” and a “destination for doing business”.
On the other hand, deal-making is also a way for Rwanda to blunt international criticism. As the Foreign Office warned in March 2021, if a deal went ahead, Britain “would need to be prepared to constrain UK positions on Rwanda’s human rights record”. This already seems to have been borne out: in 2012, when Rwanda was accused by the UN of backing an armed group responsible for mass killings and rapes in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, the UK withdrew £21m in aid to pressure Rwanda to stop. This year, when the UN made the same accusation, prompting the US, Belgium, Germany and France to call on Rwanda to end its support for the armed group, the UK issued a vague statement that didn’t even mention Rwanda by name.
Rwanda’s own interests aside, was it actually capable of doing the job the UK was asking of it? In some respects Rwanda, which is a party to the refugee convention, is a regional leader in refugee management. The country, which hosts 134,000 refugees from neighbouring Burundi and Democratic Republic of Congo, gives refugees full access to work, healthcare and education, and lets them move freely around the country. But it has far fewer resources at its disposal than the UK. The UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) says that about 90% of Rwanda’s refugees are hosted in isolated rural camps, with most dependent on humanitarian assistance from the World Food Programme, the UNHCR and other aid agencies.
A greater problem still, since Britain would be relying on Rwanda to handle people’s asylum applications, is that its asylum system is largely untested. The vast majority of refugees from Burundi and DRC were granted refugee status by diktat, on arrival in the country. That’s relatively easy for a state to do. It is much harder to consider asylum claims one by one, in accordance with international law. That requires a bureaucracy capable of listening to an individual’s story, often working in two or more languages, and assessing it in a fair and open manner. If the individual disagrees with a decision, then there needs to be an independent authority – usually a judge – to hear their appeal. Above all, such a system should not endanger people by sending them back to countries where their lives are at risk, a practice known in refugee law as refoulement.
On paper, Rwanda has such a system. In practice, not so much. According to the UNHCR, which gave evidence in court, Rwanda’s asylum system is opaque, under-resourced and discriminatory. Initial screening is carried out by a branch of the country’s intelligence services, which, the UNHCR says, has “arbitrarily denied access” to LGBTQ asylum-seekers and those from certain parts of the world, particularly the Middle East and Afghanistan. (Rwanda disputes these claims.)
The Rwandan state lacks staff and training – as recently as last year, according to the UNHCR, it employed just one civil servant to sift through claims at an early stage of the process – while asylum-seekers struggle to find interpreters and lawyers. And although Rwanda’s high court is supposed to be the final court of appeal for those who wish to challenge a decision, there’s no way to assess its record on asylum appeals because, according to the UNHCR, it’s never actually heard one before.
There is also evidence that the Rwandan state has directly harmed refugees. The most notorious incident happened in 2018, when at least a dozen Congolese refugees were shot dead by security forces during a protest over food rations in the country’s west. Rwanda’s deal with Israel, meanwhile, resulted in most of the refugees leaving Rwanda. Some were “forcibly expelled to neighbouring countries”, according to a 2017 UN report. Data collected by the academic Mollie Gerver, a migration specialist at King’s College London, suggests that some Eritreans expelled from Rwanda were later murdered by the Islamic State in Libya or drowned in the Mediterranean during their attempts to reach Europe.
Nonetheless, the British government pushed on, deciding that it could sidestep these problems by paying Rwanda to improve its asylum system. Over the summer of 2021, discussions between the two governments developed quickly.
On 29 July, the same day that Johnson and Kagame both addressed a global education conference in London, Raab approved Rwanda for intensive engagement, along with three other countries on the Foreign Office shortlist. A few days later, the British high commissioner in Kigali met with Rwanda’s foreign minister, Vincent Biruta, to confirm the start of technical negotiations, proposing a call between ministers to “bless” the arrangement.
* * *
By the end of 2021, the two sides had the outline of a deal. In early 2022, a Home Office civil servant was dispatched to Kigali as a liaison officer, to lead technical discussions with the Rwandan government.
Besides negotiating, the UK government had one other crucial task: to make sure that any such arrangement would abide by its own laws. If the British state wants to deport someone, it is legally obliged to give them due process and check for mitigating factors. Central to the court challenge to the Rwanda policy is Article 3 of the European convention on human rights, which places an absolute ban on torture and other serious ill-treatment. That means not sending people to countries where they might be tortured – or to countries that might subsequently place them at risk by deporting them a second time.
For the Home Office, a key part of the process is its formal assessment of conditions in the destination country, known as Country Policy and Information Notes (CPIN). Based on in-house research by a dedicated team, the CPIN is intended to guide Home Office caseworkers when they make decisions on asylum claims and appeals.
As negotiations reached the closing stage in early 2022, pressure was mounting to complete a new CPIN for Rwanda. According to an excerpt of a witness statement – shared with journalists at the start of the high court hearing last September – Martin Stares, head of the country information unit, said his team had begun carrying out research “on the internet taken from a range of reliable sources” in 2021.
Their first in-person visit to Rwanda didn’t take place until late January 2022, however, and it did not yield much. The four-strong delegation of civil servants met with Rwandan government officials who explained the workings of the country’s asylum system in general terms. According to the official notes from the trip, the only dedicated refugee site the team visited was the camp hosting evacuees from Libya, at Gashora, about an hour’s drive south of Kigali. “A resident told us it was good at Gashora,” state the notes – but even this wasn’t particularly useful information, since Rwanda runs the Gashora camp jointly with the UN.
In March, with UK officials noting a “pressing” need for more information, since the two governments were “in a position to reach agreement in a matter of weeks”, the country information team made a second fact-finding trip. This time, they were authorised to meet with local UNHCR representatives, the most reliable source of independent information. However, the team was instructed not to reveal the true purpose of their visit. The UNHCR had already publicly criticised the UK government’s asylum policy, and an internal Home Office message sent before the visit warned that “engagement with UNHCR gives them more time to campaign against these measures when they are announced”. After returning to the UK on 23 March, the country information team began to put their report together.
In April 2022, Britain and Rwanda announced their deal to the world, with Britain making a first payment of £120m to Rwanda the same month, plus another £20m to fund preparations for the arrival of deportees. The agreement was expressed in a memorandum of understanding – unlike a formal treaty, a non-legally binding document – which stated that Rwanda would “treat each relocated individual, and process their claim for asylum, in accordance with the refugee convention”. Asylum-seekers would be treated in accordance with international human rights law. A “monitoring committee” would be established to oversee standards.
Behind the scenes, however, the CPIN still wasn’t finished. And what happened next, the lawyers currently challenging the government’s policy have argued, demonstrates the lack of objectivity in the way the final report was prepared. On 26 April, two supposedly independent reviewers – both of whom, it appears, worked for the British government – provided comments on the report.
The first, a Foreign Office analyst, warned that “some of the language could be strengthened as it will be criticised for not being explicit about the situation in Rwanda”. This analyst pointed to Rwanda’s record of political oppression and suggested that refugees who spoke out might run into problems.
The second set of comments came from a member of the country information team who had not worked on the draft. Although this reviewer agreed with some of the Foreign Office analyst’s warnings, he also proposed ways that the CPIN could present information in a more positive light. “Tried to improve the tone without resorting to fiction,” read one of his comments.
Having sent the draft to be reviewed by two British government employees, the Home Office then appeared to send it to the Rwandan government, so they could make comments on this assessment of their own country. In late April and early May, correspondence shows that the draft was emailed to a Rwandan official addressed as “Colonel”. The email explained to the Colonel that the report “helps with the assessment that Rwanda is a safe country to transfer individuals to and helps manage criticisms the partnership has and will face in the media or through litigation”.
The CPIN documents were published on 9 May 2022, incorporating some but not all of the reviewers’ recommendations. It wasn’t until July – well after the first flight was supposed to have taken off – that a genuinely independent review of the CPIN was finally made. An asylum expert hired by the independent chief inspector of borders and immigration found “serious methodological shortcomings” with the country information team’s notes from their visits to Rwanda. The team, the reviewer found, had allowed Rwandan government officials to sit in on meetings with supposedly independent NGOs, and had even failed to inform people of the purpose of their visit. The notes “do not meet even the minimum standards of any primary research, let alone that used to inform crucial government policy”, wrote the reviewer, concluding that “none of the information provided in the interview notes [from the] CPIN should be relied upon”.
In court, the Home Office argued that the CPIN had aimed to provide “relevant, reliable, objective, impartial and up-to-date” information. Besides, it said, this wasn’t the only research officials carried out into Rwanda’s asylum system. The British civil servants conducting negotiations had also asked their Rwandan counterparts for information. Above all, the Home Office argued, the assurances on safety given by Rwanda in two notes verbales – a record of diplomatic correspondence accompanying the memorandum of understanding – were word enough.
Yet months after the deal was signed, British officials were still pressing their Rwandan counterparts for vital details of how the arrangement would work in practice. “We need to continue the work on assurances,” wrote Kristian Armstrong, the head of Home Office third country asylum partnerships, on 17 June, three days after the first deportation flight was supposed to have taken off. “GoR [the Rwandan government] need to know that specifics really help us.” There was, Armstrong acknowledged, “a potential catch-22 situation where we say GoR have a great new system, but UNHCR say there is no evidence to say it will work and is ‘safe’.”
* * *
June 2022 was supposed to be a moment of triumph for both Johnson and Kagame. The first deportation flight should have taken off in mid-June, allowing both leaders to bask in the success of their deal a few weeks later at the Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Kigali. Kagame had personally overseen its planning, holding in-person meetings with the head of the Commonwealth, the then-Prince Charles.
Instead, the grounded flight overshadowed the summit, with both leaders having to bat away questions from journalists about whether the deal had failed, and whether Rwanda was a suitable destination for refugees. At the closing press conference, Kagame responded to a question from the BBC about Rwanda’s human rights record with a 25-minute diatribe. Johnson, meanwhile, called critics of the deal “condescending” and insisted it was still on track.
In fact, the policy was being derailed by a series of unforced errors by the British government. The first mistake concerned the individuals the Home Office had selected for deportation. It’s not clear exactly how many people were sent letters telling them they would be removed to Rwanda, or the criteria by which they were chosen. In court, the Home Office argued that to disclose this information would allow people-smugglers to coach their clients to circumvent the rules in future. But it’s clear from the individual cases we know about that the Home Office chose many people whose appeals were likely to succeed.
Take the three children, for instance, who the Home Office wrongly declared to be adults and detained in preparation for sending to Rwanda. Or the Iranian Christian convert, known to the court as AS, who had travelled to the UK with his son, but whom the Home Office wrongly said had no family in Britain. Or the many people who reported suicidal ideation, depression and symptoms of PTSD to doctors in the detention centres where they were being held. Or the Kurdish Iraqi man known to the court as NSK, told by the Home Office that he should have claimed asylum when he was in France, who pointed out that the smugglers gave him no choice, since they beat and threatened anyone who stepped out of line.
In some of the cases, the Home Office simply messed up the paperwork. This would emerge when the legal challenge to the policy finally reached the high court in the second half of 2022, in a “rolled-up” hearing that considered several dozen individual appeals alongside wider challenges to the legality of the policy itself. The high court judges gave those wider arguments short shrift, and found that the government was perfectly entitled to base its assessment of Rwanda’s asylum system on the assurances given by Rwanda itself.
But the judges did quash the decisions to deport in many of the individual cases, ordering the Home Office to reconsider. Some casework contained basic factual errors – the Home Office mixed one Syrian man up with another – while others simply failed to consider vital evidence from the UNHCR. The Home Office made the process even more complicated by having two offices, one in Glasgow and one in Croydon, assess each individual case.
“Ordinarily, a court will have little to say about the way a secretary of state chooses to allocate decision-making among her officials,” noted the judges – but in this case it was a problem. Why, in such a highly sensitive procedure, was a mistake like this allowed to happen? According to Colin Yeo, an experienced immigration barrister, “it was just incompetence … there was clearly massive political pressure to crack on, basically”.
I asked Ndushabandi, the Rwandan political scientist, if the Rwandan government was surprised at the way Britain handled the practicalities. “I don’t think they predicted this,” he told me, with a wry smile. “I don’t think Rwanda could predict that the UK would have such incoherence and inconsistency on such a very sensitive topic.”
The UK and Rwanda, a Home Office spokesperson told me, “have worked closely together to create our landmark Migration and Economic Development Partnership to break the business model of people smuggling gangs. We remain fully committed to this policy, as does the Rwandan government, and we will continue to defend it robustly in the courts.”
* * *
It is clear that ministers ignored warnings about Rwanda’s suitability for a migration deal, and that the Home Office made mistakes in trying to carry out the plan. But does that make the policy unlawful? The answer comes down to how much trust the courts should place in a government’s word.
In its defence, presented to the high court, the Home Office argued that Rwanda’s assurances were enough, and that any past bad practices were irrelevant, since the UK and Rwanda both had a strong interest in making the new system work. When the high court agreed with this point, in a decision handed down in December 2022, it was enough for Sunak’s government to recommit to the policy.
In March 2023, the current home secretary Suella Braverman introduced a new bill, later passed into law as the Illegal Migration Act, which went one step further than her predecessor. Where Patel had sought to make it possible for the government to deport asylum-seekers who enter the UK without permission, Braverman’s law makes it a duty.
But in June this year, the court of appeal delivered a verdict that threw the whole Rwanda policy into question. By a two-to-one majority, a panel of judges found that there was a genuine risk that asylum-seekers might have their right to freedom from torture violated if they were sent to Rwanda. Its asylum system couldn’t be trusted not to wrongly reject people and send them onwards to danger.
Although the Rwandan government had acted “in good faith”, wrote Lord Justice Underhill, one of the three appeal judges, its assurances weren’t enough. Home Office civil servants had worked hard to find out the truth, he continued, but “perhaps as the result of the pressure of the timetable” they “were too ready to accept assurances which were unparticularised or unevidenced or the details of which were unexplored”.
The British government hopes that this three-year drama is reaching its final act. The supreme court’s judgment is expected by the end of this year and Sunak has already indicated that if the supreme court finds in the government’s favour, he will ignore any further injunctions from the European court of human rights. Even if individuals appeal against their deportation, government sources have briefed journalists that it will send them to Rwanda regardless.
Braverman has spoken of her “dream” of seeing a deportation flight take off for Kigali, but what would it mean for the Rwanda deal to actually work? What would success look like? For Rwanda, it has already yielded some rewards. Officials like the Rwandan high commissioner to London, caught by journalists in an undercover sting last month, might rankle at seeing the UK pose as “the refugee country, the solace country, the protection country, the compassion country”, while Rwanda’s reputation is hauled over the coals. But Rwanda has got the money that was promised – and for the moment, it has one less potential critic when its own human rights abuses are exposed.
For the British government, the policy would not only have to succeed in deporting asylum-seekers to Rwanda, it would have to actually deter people from crossing the Channel. Would the sight of a few hundred people exiled to Kigali really convince someone who has crossed the Sahara, or the Mediterranean, or the mountains between Iran and Turkey, or spent days cooped up in a lorry across Turkey and Europe, not to take that final trip from Calais to Dover? Or if the intention really is to deport far greater numbers, perhaps tens of thousands of people a year, would Rwanda – or any other country for that matter – really be willing to accept them?
In the meantime, the government’s plans are in limbo. And with the threat of deportation still hanging over them, the people targeted by the Rwanda policy are in limbo, too. More than 24,000 asylum-seekers have now been sent letters by the Home Office warning them they might be deported.
“Nothing is ended, it’s still going on, they still want to send me,” Hamza, the asylum-seeker who had the late reprieve on 14 June 2022, told me. “[I am] in complete shock. I don’t know what fate they have in store for me. I just can’t believe that it’s possible in this country to treat a human being like this. I fled war, danger, in my country and came to seek shelter in this country, to be protected, to live a normal life. But instead, I’ve been treated like a criminal, I’ve been made to suffer.”
Hamza’s name has been changed to protect his identity
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