People Not Boats: Sacrificing Human Rights on the Altar of the Hostile Environment in the UK
- Zrinka Bralo
- Jul 1, 2024
- 27 min read
Updated: Jun 27
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]
This is, albeit limited, an attempt to chart some of the trajectories and connections of how hostile environment immigration policy, enforcement, and populist approach to immigration, undermine fundamental human rights and bring into question UK compliance with and membership of international human rights treaties and bodies and the rule of law.
It is also a reflection on the impact on people’s lives from the perspective of a frontline campaigner for migrant and refugee rights and a survivor of the siege of Sarajevo and the UK asylum system.[5]
Despite the alarming state of affairs and the horrifying extent to which governments are willing to sink in their implementation of the hostile environment immigration policy, this is a story of hope—how people build resilience, resist hostility and human rights violations, imagine better future, organise in solidarity, and speak out for dignity and justice for all.
Context
There is widespread populist belief, deeply rooted in the right-wing, nationalistic, and scarcity narrative, that rights cannot be shared or afforded to everyone. To take this logic further, as inalienable as human rights might be, there aren’t enough rights for everyone. Therefore, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, ‘the right to have rights’ is reserved only for citizens.[6] The not-so-subtle proposition that non-citizens, immigrants, refugees, or foreigners—currently the chief category of the ‘other’, are not to be afforded the same human rights as citizens is nothing new or surprising. At the risk of sounding cynical, it is all too often that we see citizens’ human rights violated, especially if rights are in the way of power interests, political or commercial or both.
