Rwanda ruling can be appealed

Flights remain on hold until appeal courts have ruled

Asylum-seekers who challenged the then home secretary’s decision to send them to Rwanda were granted permission to appeal by the High Court this morning.

Last month, Lord Justice Lewis and Mr Justice Swift ruled that it was lawful for the government to make arrangements for relocating asylum-seekers to Rwanda and for their asylum claims to be decided there rather than in the United Kingdom. However, the judges said that the home secretary had not properly considered the circumstances of the eight individual claimants whose cases were before the court. For that reason, the decisions in those cases were set aside and the cases were referred back to the home secretary for her to consider afresh.

Priti Patel, then home secretary, and Rwanda’s foreign minister Vincent Biruta

The judges agreed with Lord Pannick KC, for Suella Braverman, that permission to appeal should be granted only on points where there was a real prospect of success or some other compelling reason for granting permission. They whittled down the grounds put forward by individual claimants, allowing some but not all to go before the Court of Appeal.

Alasdair Mackenzie 🧡 @AlasdairMack66

RWANDA LATEST: permission to appeal granted to most of the claimants on various grounds relating to safety of the Rwandan asylum system, fairness of UK process to decide who gets sent there, compatibility with ‘no penalties’ part of the Refugee Convention & with retained EU law

No indication was given of when the appeal would come before the court but it’s not likely to be before the spring, with judgment to follow some weeks later. In the meantime, flights to Rwanda will remain on hold.

Although claimants were given permission to appeal against the court’s general findings, they had been successful in arguing that their individual circumstances had not been considered by the home secretary. For this reason, she was ordered to pay some of their legal costs.

Update 17 January: The judgment has now been published. There is also a short summary.