Letter from HRS to Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Home Secretary Yvette Cooper on street riots across the UK.  Dear Prime Minister and Home Secretary,

We, the Human Rights Solidarity, a registered charity in England and Wales, commend your efforts to control the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots. As a human rights organization working mainly with immigrants of Muslim background, we wholeheartedly support the decision of the Home Secretary to strengthen the protection for Muslim communities across the UK. These measures will certainly ease the tensions, but there are systemic issues that need to be addressed urgently.

The far-right sentiments against the immigrants are byproducts of the decade-old Hostile Environment Policy of the previous governments. These policies created a pejorative vocabulary about immigrants, led to a culture of defamatory news coverage when it came to the immigrant communities, and paved the way to the current toxicity of disinformation in social media.

The fact that the austerity regime left behind vulnerable communities is well-understood and addressed by your government. But the equally important and even more destructive hostile environment policies are yet to be addressed in full.

We hereby invite the Home Secretary to publicly declare the end of the hostile environment and establish mechanisms to cleanse the vestiges of that policy in the civil service.

We invite your government to replace the existing immigration detention centres which proved too costly to run and secure, and too inhuman to experience, even before the riots, with modern compounds where detention is not meant to act as a deterrent.

We invite the Home Secretary to review the existing policy of not letting the asylum seekers work and adopt the German model where the asylum seekers will be able to work as soon as they find a job and attain a certain level of language fluency. This will ease the economic burden of the asylum mechanism on the public purse.

We invite the Home Secretary to review the current policy of starting the five-year residence requirement before applying for Indefinite Leave to Remain from the day the refugee statuses of the asylum seekers are recognized by the Home Office. That period starts, all over Europe, from the day the asylum application is made and both the social fabric and the economic system benefit from the elimination of uncertainty from the lives of the refugees as early as possible.

Former Labour Party governments have been architects of devolution and human rights regulations. With more control in the Parliament, and with more urgency at the societal level, we are expecting the current Labour Government to continue the good work of the previous Labour eras.

Sincerely Yours,

Mehmet Ozdemir

President of the Board of Trustees

Human Rights Solidarity

PM Starmer, abandoned the plan to fly asylum seekers to Rwanda. The scheme faced legal challenges and was deemed ineffective. Britain’s new Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, announced on Saturday that he would cancel a plan to fly thousands of asylum seekers from Britain to Rwanda. This plan, originally introduced by the Conservative government in 2022, aimed to stop asylum seekers from arriving on small boats by sending them to the East African nation. However, the plan faced extensive legal challenges, preventing any asylum seekers from being sent to Rwanda.

In his first press conference as prime minister, Starmer explained that the Rwanda policy would be abandoned because it would have only affected about 1% of asylum seekers and failed to serve as an effective deterrent. He stated, “The Rwanda scheme was dead and buried before it started. It’s never been a deterrent. I’m not prepared to continue with gimmicks that don’t act as a deterrent.”

The UK Supreme Court had declared the policy unlawful in November 2023, citing concerns that Rwanda could not be considered a safe third country. This led to the UK government signing a new treaty with Rwanda and passing new legislation to override the court’s decision. However, the legality of these actions was being challenged by charities and unions in the courts.

The British government had already invested hundreds of millions of pounds in Rwanda to set up accommodation and hire additional officials to process asylum seekers, funds that cannot be recovered. On July 8, Rwanda responded to the UK’s intention to end the Migration and Economic Development Partnership Agreement, stating it was “a problem of the UK, not Rwanda.”

Sonya Sceats, CEO of Freedom from Torture, one of the many organizations and charities that have campaigned to stop the Rwanda plan, welcomed Starmer’s announcement on Saturday. “We applaud Keir Starmer for moving immediately to close the door on this shameful scheme that played politics with the lives of people fleeing torture and persecution,” she said.

Earlier in the day, Agnes Callamard, Secretary-General of Amnesty International, had called on the new Labour government to follow through on its campaign promise to scrap the Rwanda pact.

“Our asylum system must be made to focus on delivering as fairly and efficiently as possible the security and certainty to which every refugee is entitled, however they may arrive,” Callamard wrote in a social media post.

She added that this is “just as demanded by our international obligations, the rule of law, and basic respect for every human.”

BY BURAK BATUHAN KARAKUS