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People Not Boats: Sacrificing Human Rights on the Altar of the Hostile Environment in the UK

Updated: Sep 15

If you tolerate this, your children will be next!

Manic Street Preachers, 1998

 

Introduction

 

The issue of immigration and human rights law, or more precisely, the human rights of people on the move, has become one of the most urgent challenges for many Western societies. Syrian refugees walking across Europe in 2015 almost faded away in the collective memory. They were replaced by the images of people clinging on the planes leaving Kabul, a mass exodus from Ukraine, people desperately trying to escape Sudan, and now the catastrophe in Gaza. In 2023, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) estimated 110 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. Many of them, like 750,000 Rohingyas[1] or 120,000 ethnic Armenians expelled from Nagorno-Karabakh in October 2023,[2] have not been properly registered on the Western news cycle.

 

Wherever, however, and whenever they arrive, people seeking protection or migrating are often perceived as a threat despite being vulnerable, insignificant in numbers, or needed for the local economy (only 3.6% of the world’s people lived outside their country of birth in 2020).[3]

 

The UNHCR has warned that the UK immigration legislation passed in 2023 is ‘inconsistent with the country’s obligation under the international human rights and refugee law’.[4]

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