UK can’t return Channel migrants to France because of Brexit, Cameron suggests
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Britain can no longer return Channel migrants to France because of Brexit, Lord Cameron has indicated.
The Foreign Secretary said a migrant returns agreement with France to help break up smuggling gangs and stop people making the perilous journey across the Channel was “simply not possible”.
He said “the situation we’re in” means a deal that was in place when he was Prime Minister to send migrants back to France when they landed in Britain could not be replicated.
Asked whether this was because of Brexit, he said: “Because of the situation we’re in, because of the attitude of others and all the rest of it.”
The pre-Brexit Dublin Agreement allowed the UK to return migrants to “safe” EU countries where they should have claimed asylum if they had passed through them. This was scrapped under Brexit but has not been replaced.
His comments come just two days after Rishi Sunak’s Rwanda Bill, aimed at blocking further setbacks to the Government’s controversial deportation scheme, passed through Parliament following months of wrangling between MPs and peers.
Asked whether he would have pursued the Rwanda policy while he was prime minister, Lord Cameron told ITV’s Peston show: “We had a totally different situation because [we] could return people directly to France.
“Now, I’d love that situation to be the case again – that’s the most sensible thing. People land on a beach in Kent, you take them straight back to France, you therefore break the model of the people smugglers. That’s not available at the moment. It’s simply not possible.”
Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has made it clear that France will not make any bilateral returns deal with the UK, saying instead that it would have to be negotiated on an EU-wide basis.
Following Lord Cameron’s comments, a Downing Street spokesman said there was no returns deal with the EU on the table.
The spokesman indicated there was little prospect of one being negotiated because the new pan-European migration agreement on returning migrants depended on member states accepting quotas of migrants, adding: “On returns agreements, we would never accept quotas in return for that.”
Despite calls by some senior Tories for the UK to quit the European Convention on Human Rights, Lord Cameron said that leaving the ECHR would not be “necessary” to prevent small boat crossings.
The Foreign Secretary said Mr Sunak’s deportation policy would work without the UK needing to leave the ECHR. The Prime Minister had previously hinted that he would be willing to leave the convention if it prevented the implementation of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda.
Lord Cameron told the Peston show: “I don’t think it’s necessary to leave the ECHR. I don’t think that needs to happen to make this policy work.”
The Safety of Rwanda Act aims to limit legal challenges by migrants against their deportation to exceptional cases, and gives ministers powers to ignore rule 39 orders by the European Court of Human Rights that were used to block the first flights to Rwanda in June 2022.
In the past week Liz Truss, the former prime minister, Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, and Robert Jenrick, the former immigration minister have called for the UK to quit the European Convention on Human Rights.
Mrs Braverman urged Mr Sunak to quit the convention now, or risk losing the chance to do so for a decade.
She told the National Conservatism conference in Brussels earlier this month that leaving the ECHR was not just the “right and necessary” thing to do but also the “politically expedient” option for the Government.
