‘The Rwanda bill is a legal fiction that makes the law look like an ass,’ Lord Anderson KC said in the final debate on the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill in the House of Lords on Monday, ‘and those who make it, asses.’ Shortly afterwards, the Lords, which had sent amendments back to the Commons again and again and seen them rebuffed each time, passed the bill. The Commons won the game of parliamentary ping-pong, and Rwanda became a ‘safe country’ in the eyes of British law.
Officially, Brook House is not a prison, and no one is kept there because they have been convicted of a crime and sentenced by a court. Instead, it houses more than five hundred men who have been found – or are suspected – to be in the country illegally, and are due to be deported. In theory, no one is supposed to reside there for any meaningful length of time. Legislation restricts the use of IRCs (Brook House is one of ten across the UK) to holding those whose deportation is ‘imminent’. But people are routinely detained in IRCs for weeks or months.
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