Life and Law at the Border: UK Immigration Law After Rwanda 

Guest post by Nicola Palmer. Nicola is a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Criminology, University of Cape Town and a Reader in Criminal Law at Kings College London. She is the thematic lead for Border Criminologies work on ‘Law and the Courts’ and the author of ‘Courts in Conflict: Interpreting the Layers of Justice in Post-Genocide Rwanda’.  

On 30 January 2025, the UK Government introduced the ‘Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill 2025’ in the House of Commons. The Bill heralds the formal end to the UK and Rwanda’s migration agreement, repealing the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Act 2024.  

Three days earlier, M23 rebels, reportedly supported by Rwanda, swept into the Congolese town of Goma and are continuing to advance toward the South Kivu town of Bukavu. The UK foreign secretary David Lammy responded by threatening to suspend the current £32m of bilateral UK assistance to Rwanda. The political and legal basis of the UK/Rwanda ‘Migration and Economic Partnership Agreement’ has unraveled. Yet life at the border, whether in the English Channel or in Kivu, remains fundamentally vulnerable. The new Bill leaves intact the UK’s hostile environment towards refugees, asylum seekers and immigrants, including the potential for future arrangements similar to the Rwanda agreement. In addition, the financial incentives tied to the previous agreement has insulated Rwanda from any immediate pressure that could be created through the suspension of British aid.  

Alongside repealing the Safety of Rwanda Act, the ‘Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill’ introduces a raft of new broadly construed immigration-related criminal offences. These include the supplying and handling of articles used in enabling illegal entry into the UK or in assisting unlawful immigration. While some humanitarian objects are excluded from the definition of ‘articles’, the list is hardly exhaustive, and the offences carry up to 14 years’ imprisonment. As previous work by Vicky Taylor has persuasively shown, it is most likely that any prosecutions under these new offences will target asylum seekers or those supporting them rather than the people profiting from their vulnerability such as people smugglers.  

The Bill repeals Section 2 of the Illegal Migration Act 2023 which created an obligation on the Home Secretary to remove any person from the UK who did not have prior permission to arrive in the country and had not arrived directly from a state in which they face a real risk of persecution. Yet it leaves in place Section 16 of the Nationality and Borders Act 2022, retaining the Home Secretary’s statutory power to determine an asylum case as inadmissible and Section 59 of the Illegal Migration Act, which extends the number of countries for which asylum applications are automatically deemed inadmissible. It was these inadmissibility provisions that underpinned the initial exclusion of individuals the UK government intended to send to Rwanda. While the ‘Rwanda Plan’ is now officially over, more so-called ‘safe third country’ agreements in which the UK displaces its obligations under the Refugee Convention onto other countries remain permissible under UK law. Overall, the legislative approach of the UK remains one of hostility rather than the constructive planning for a humane immigration system. 

Back in Goma, civilians have been fleeing across the border into Rwanda, joining over 60 000 Congolese refugees already living there. Rwanda continues to both fund military activity in the Democratic Republic of the Congo while simultaneously denying this support and offering sanctuary to those fleeing the violence. Any potential pressure exerted through UK aid suspension may have been largely offset by the previous £270 million of direct budgetary support that the UK paid to Rwanda as part of the ‘Migration and Economic Partnership Agreement’. While Rwanda’s real budgetary vulnerability lies with the current USAID’s 90 day funding freeze implemented for an entirely different set of political reasons by the current US Administration, under President Donald Trump. For the people subject to these shifts in legal and political relationships, life and law at the border remains deeply precarious.  

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