LONDON: The UK government on Tuesday defended its controversial policy to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, even as the entire senior leadership of the Church of England branded it shameful and immoral.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss insisted the first flight to Kigali would take off no matter how many people were on board.
According to the charity Care4Calais, only seven migrants are expected to be deported on Tuesday night, well down on the up to 130 expected by the authorities.
“We’re expecting to send the flight later today”, she told Sky News but said she was unable to confirm the numbers due to be on board.
“There will be people on the flights and if they’re not on this flight, they will be on the next flight”, she added.
Truss said the policy, which the UN refugee agency has criticised as “all wrong”, was vital to break up human-trafficking gangs exploiting vulnerable migrants.
Record numbers of migrants have made the perilous Channel crossing from northern France, heaping pressure on the government in London to act after it promised to tighten borders after Brexit.
In a sign of the scale of the issue, Britain’s domestic Press Association news agency said some 260 people attempting the crossing in small boats were brought ashore at the Channel port of Dover by 1200 GMT on Tuesday.
A series of legal challenges in recent days has failed to stop the deportations, which the two senior-most clerics in the Church of England and 23 bishops said were “immoral” and “shames Britain”.
“They (migrants) are the vulnerable that the Old Testament calls us to value”, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell wrote in a letter to ‘The Times’.
“We cannot offer asylum to everyone, but we must not outsource our ethical responsibilities, or discard international law — which protects the right to claim asylum.”
At the weekend, it was reported that Queen Elizabeth II’s heir, Prince Charles, had privately described the government’s plan as “appalling”.
Truss, though, hit back. “The people who are immoral in this case are the people traffickers trading on human misery”, she said.
“Our policy is completely legal. It’s completely moral”, she added, accusing critics of having no alternative plan. — AFP