Thread by @IkaFerrerGotic

Highly inaccurate! Let's unpack the #Rwanda idea carefully, but without the unnecessary cinematic effect we see in this HO vid. I mean, we ARE talking about human lives here. Let's get serious! | 🧵

https://twitter.com/ukhomeoffice/status/1637547046285582336

Colleague broadcaster Kenan Malik once wrote "Treating refugees like ‘waste people’ is abhorrent, wherever they end up".

It relevant now more than ever. And this thread is based on these findings.

Political opposition in Rwanda is not tolerated and arbitrary detention, torture and even killings are accepted methods of enforcing control too.

Rwandans abroad face sanctions for any form of dissent, critics are under constant surveillance. Within the country, journalists are routinely “disappeared” and opponents crushed. Many refugees from a previous scheme arranged by Israel were coerced and forced to flee the country.

What the British government is trying to do is conceal the fact that this is its official view, too, in an attempt to salvage the Rwanda deportation scheme. Including the obvious failed PR operation by #SuellaBraverman, I mean, are we looking at the same thing?

World Bank defined #Rwanda as a low-income country and among the poorest nations of the world, while UN indicated that this country could be described as "unsafe with hostile environment policies by the Rwandan government".

Rich countries bolting their doors and getting poor countries to act as homeless shelters for their “unwanted”. Britain views asylum seekers as a political problem so it has used its economic clout and political weight to get a poorer country to clean up what it considers a mess.

It’s not a coincidence that the asylum seekers are being deported to a country such as Rwanda and not to ones such as France or Sweden. Other countries do it too.

For decades, many rich nations have moved from keeping out asylum seekers to “offshoring" - using 3rd countries as processing centres for asylum seekers - to straightforward mass deportation without any consideration of those involved, their backgrounds or their futures.

From Australia dumping asylum seekers in Manus and Nauru to the EU using militias and warlords in Africa to capture and imprison potential migrants before they can reach the Mediterranean, to America employing troops to prevent unauthorised people from moving towards the US.

ALL THIS without any consideration of human rights or even the most basic norms of decency.

We should be concerned about human rights abuses in Rwanda. But we should be concerned even more about the system of “waste people” management now being constructed by the richest nations of the world.