Loophole or Law-Breaking? Rwanda Plan’s Inconsistency with International Refugee Law

In April 2022, the United Kingdom announced its plans to deport asylum seekers arriving by small boat to Rwanda, a policy which has been dubbed the ‘Rwanda Plan’. The Rwanda Plan seeks to address a problem which British policymakers have grappled with for decades—how to reduce the number of asylum seekers entering the country and achieving refugee status. The UK Government argued that the Rwanda Plan is entirely congruent with international refugee law. This claim has been refuted by various human rights agencies, the most prominent of which is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. These organisations have argued that the Rwanda Plan violates the principle of non-refoulement. This article contributes to the international legal critique of the Rwanda Plan by arguing that the Rwanda Plan also violates the principle of nondiscrimination. It does so by inspecting the demographics of asylum seekers likely to be affected and contrasting the Rwanda Plan with the contemporaneous Ukraine asylum schemes. This article deploys an interpretivist legal perspective to put forward this argument, that international human rights law has an inherently moral purpose and therefore must be understood in its moral context.