Government’s Rwanda migrant plan doomed to fail, warns lawyer Mr Loophole

A celebrity lawyer dubbed Mr Loophole has said the government’s latest bid to get the flagship Rwanda immigration policy past the courts is doomed to fail.

Solicitor Nick Freeman, who has been highly successful in helping high-profile clients in court, said the Prime Minister’s plans to have asylum seekers on planes to the African nation by early next year were not going to happen.

New Home Secretary James Cleverly flew to Rwanda this week to sign a new treaty which he insisted addresses all of the reasons that caused the Supreme Court to deem the Government’s flagship asylum policy unlawful.

But speaking to GB News Mr Freeman said Rwanda’s “appalling” Human Rights record was still something the courts could not ignore.

He said: ‌“It’s not going to work. The Supreme Court three weeks ago upheld the Court of Appeal’s ruling.

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‌“What the government is doing now is what they should have done before this case reached The Court of Appeal. They are closing the gate after the horse has bolted.

‌“The measures they are putting in place are admirable; the whole purpose of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda is to act as a deterrent.

“And I’m not suggesting that maybe two or three years down the road this may work but of course the Prime Minister is under enormous pressure. He wants the first flights to be in the air by, I think, March or April of next year. And that simply isn’t going to happen.”

Mr Freeman added previous experiments with the Rwanda system by Israel had not worked but he said it could work in the future for the British.

He continued: “So what the Supreme Court has said is that they are incentivised to make it work and with these proposals, if the government goes back in two, three years time, it may get there. But at the moment it’s bound by the Supreme Court ruling.

‌“And the government can’t just waft that aside by putting different labels and plugging the gaps. It simply isn’t going to work.”

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Mr Freeman said if the government tried to “stifle” the courts it wasn’t going to work.

He said: “The government’s got two parts to the plan: One is to fill in the holes and the second is to actually stop any appeal to any court on this particular subject.

‌“So it’s actually trying to stifle the judiciary, which of course is against the rule of law. It’s a significant point and the government is not going to get away with it. The judiciary is completely independent.

‌“[The Supreme Court] needs to see it working. Three weeks ago, it was unsafe, it’s not going to become safe tomorrow.

‌“Two years down the road, it may be safe when, after a period of time, the steps that have been put in place have been found to work.

‌“The government have already committed spending fortunes at the moment on staff there, training them. That’s the problem. There’s a lot of money that’s being wasted so the government has to get this through but my view is there’s not a chance of it going through by next April, it will be much longer.”

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