Thread by @TRF_Stories

🇬🇧 The UK is pressing on with a plan to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda - even after a European court halted the first flight.

🚨 Campaigners are alarmed - but it's not the first nation to send people overseas.

Here's how others have adopted offshoring policies. 🧵

🇦🇺 Australia

⭕️ Introduced in 2001, the country’s offshoring asylum programme specifically targets migrants arriving in Australian waters by boat.

🌏 They have been transferred to detention centres in Papua New Guinea's Manus Island and the South Pacific island nation of Nauru.

🗓 The "Pacific Solution" policy was dismantled in 2008, but it was revived in 2012 and became more restrictive in 2013.

👉 Since 2012, more than 4,000 asylum seekers, including children, have been sent to Manus and Nauru for processing.

❌ It has been strongly criticised by the @UN and aid groups who cite harsh conditions in the centres.

⭕️ 14 people have died in island camps, @humanrightsHRLC says.

👉 Australia closed the facility on Manus Island after Papua New Guinea's Supreme Court ruled it was illegal.

🇮🇱 Israel

🛩 In 2014, the country introduced a policy to send illegal immigrants and rejected asylum seekers to Rwanda and Uganda.

💵 They could either accept a one-off payment and a plane ticket to either nation - or face being deported back to their country of origin.

📑 Many who went to Rwanda and Uganda had their travel documents taken away on arrival and were held in hotels guarded by armed men, said @UniofOxford and @intrefrights.

🚫 Amid international and domestic criticism, the programme was scrapped in 2019.
tmsnrt.rs/3tOsO39

🇩🇰 Denmark

⚖️ The country passed a law in 2021 allowing refugees to be moved to asylum centres in a third nation like Rwanda.

Here, their claims would be processed.

✋ But rights groups said the new law was irresponsible and showed a lack of solidarity with people in need.

🗣 Officials said the deal would "ensure a more dignified approach than the criminal network of human traffickers that characterises migration across the Mediterranean today".

The @EU_Commission said relocating refugees outside Europe is "not possible" under current rules.

🇪🇺 European Union

❌ The bloc indirectly supports offshore asylum programmes as part of efforts to stop groups coming across the Mediterranean.

🇹🇷 It has paid Turkey billions of dollars to keep refugees and migrants from reaching Greece and has funded the Libyan Coast Guard.

🇳🇪 Under a @UN programme called the Emergency Transit Mechanism, more than 3,000 people from Libyan detention centres who were heading for Europe have been transferred to Niger.

🇱🇾A similar scheme sending asylum seekers from Libya to Rwanda began in 2019. tmsnrt.rs/3zQI3wl

🇪🇺Critics have accused the EU of outsourcing the crisis to African nations.

🇷🇼Some asylum seekers in Rwanda have said they’re leading safer lives than in Libya.

🗺However, many ultimately wish to resettle in Europe.

@nitabhalla reports.#WorldRefugeeWeek
tmsnrt.rs/3tOsO39